SOFTUNE
VOLUME 2 SEPTEMBER 1982 $200
penguin software
830 4th Avenue Geneva, II 60134 (312)232-1984
Graphics created with
The Graphics Magician
Works with Keyboard, Joystick, or Atari Joystick
Apple Is a trademark of Apple Computer. Inc. Atari Is a trademark of Warner Communications
Softline's New Policy
2
Directline
3
Master of the Mite:
An Interview with Jim Nitchals
Matthew T. Yuen
6
The Case of the Micro Mystery:
The Private Eye's on Home Computers
Andrew Christie
18
Gameline
22
New Players
27
Pac-Man Champ:
Ready on the Set
9
Adventures in Adventuring:
The Thing's the Thing
Ken Rose
28
The Amazing Maze in 3-D
Brian Fitzgerald
10
Atari Sound:
Music of the Spheres
Bill Williams
15
Apple II Graphics:
Byting Off Animation
Ken Williams
31
High Scores and Highlines
35
Sherwin Steffin's education column will return next issue.
Softline. Volume 2, Number 1. Copyright ® 1982 by Softalk Publishing Inc.
All rights reserved. Softline is published on the fifteenth day of every other
month by Softalk Publishing Inc., 11021 Magnolia Boulevard, North Holly-
wood, CA 91601. Telephone (213) 980-5074. Second - class controlled circula-
tion pending at North Hollywood, California.
Composition by Photographies, Hollywood, California. Printing by Volk-
muth Printers, Saint Cloud, Minnesota.
Apple is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, California. Atari
is a trademark of Atari Inc., Sunnyvale, California. IBM and IBM Personal
Computer are trademarks of International Business Machines, Armonk, New
York. Pet and Commodore are trademarks of Commodore Business Ma-
chines, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. TRS-80 is a trademark of Tandy Corpo-
ration, Fort Worth, Texas.
Subscriptions: Write to Softline Circulation, Box 60, North Hollywood, CA
91603. Subscriptions are $12 for one year (six issues). Please include with your
subscription order your name and address and, if applicable, the brand,
model, and serial number of the computer you own and a brief description of
your peripherals. This information is used to direct Softline best to your
needs.
Moving? Send new address and old to Softline Circulation, Box 60, North
Hollywood, CA 91603; telephone (213) 980-5074.
Postmaster: Send address changes to Softline, Box 60, North Hollywood,
CA 91603.
SEPTEMBER 1982
Softline Staff
Editorial
Editor
Margot Comstock
Tommervik
Managing Editor
Patricia Ryall
Co-Editor
Andrew Christie
Associate Editors
jean Varven
David Hunter
Directline
Tommy Gear
Assistant Editors
Michael Ferris
David Durkee
Matthew T. Yuen
Proofreader
Harry McNeil
Art
Art Director
Kurt A. Wahlner
Administration
Publisher
Al Tommervik
Associate Publisher
Mary Sue Rennells
Accountant
Evelyn Burke
Accounting Assistants Mary Milam
Lois Stickelmaier
Assistant to
the Publisher
Dan Yoder
Advertising
East Coast Sales
Paul McGinnis
Paul McGinnis Company
60 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017
(212)490-1021
Midwest and Rocky
Mountain Sales
Ted Rickard
John Sienkiewicz
Market/Media Associates
435 Locust Road
Wilmette, IL 60091
(312) 251-2541
West Coast Sales
Softline
11021 Magnolia Boulevarc
Box 60
North Hollywood
CA 91603
(213) 980-5074
Circulation
Supervisors
Hal Schick
Ron Rennells
Donna Siebert
Advertisers
Apogee Software Distributors 27
ARS Publications 17
Avalanche Productions 14
Avant-Garde Creations 34
Ber 22
Bourbon Street Press 26
Calsolt 21
Computer Diversions 32
The Computer Express 12
Don't Ask Computer Software 20
fast Coast Software 16
fdu-Ware Services Cover 4
Gold Disk Software 33
Harcourt Brace lovanovich . 7
Infocom 4-5
Kraft Systems 13
lord of the Games 9
Output Inc 23
Penguin Software Cover 2
Sierra On-line Cover 3
Snave Systems 8
Software City 25
Strom Systems 24
A New Policy
Dear Readers:
This issue begins the second year of Softline magazine and
marks a turning point in its existence. Softline will no longer
be free.
During the past year, we've sought to focus on
entertainment software for the home computer market in its
broadest aspects. Our cover stories have ranged far afield to
bring a diversity of views to the home gaming phenomenon.
Our features have introduced you to up-and-coming
programmers and companies and provided sneak previews of
innovative software. In this light, we can finally report— much
to our relief — the release of the Arcade Machine for the
Apple II computer from Broderbund Software, featured in
these pages several months ago.
We believe entertainment software is a light subject worthy
of weighty consideration. To practice what we preach, we've
brought you four regular columnists. Ken Williams has focused
on graphics techniques for the Apple II, and Bill Williams has
addressed the creation of sound for Atari programs. In
addition to the two columns speaking to specific computers,
Ken Rose has used Basic to present techniques for writing
adventure games for any computer.
And, because gaming is especially for the young, Softline
has featured an education column by Sherwin Steffin to help
youngsters and parents understand the whys and wherefores
of educational software. Steffin has taken this issue off to
prepare a treatise on arcade games for the next issue.
Softalk Publishing produces three magazines, but it is
stretching the truth not a whit to say that the staff takes great
pride and has the most fun doing Softline. Our feeling for
Softline seems to have communicated itself to you. Our
circulation has doubled and reader response has always been
strong. We bask in the warm comments received.
But it's time to put to bed the myth that Softline is an
advertiser-sponsored publication. You don't need an
advanced course in number theory to see that Softline has not
significantly increased the amount of its advertising. What that
has meant is stable revenue in the face of increasing costs,
caused by inflation and the doubling of our circulation. Try as
we might, we cannot print twice as many copies on the same
revenue.
So, sadly, we must turn to you to help bear the expense.
We take no pleasure in this act, because it's been a real joy to
give you the best magazine we could afford each issue. All of
us at Softline can testify that it's more fun to give than to
receive.
Nevertheless, Softline will now cost $12 for the six issues
representing one year. Until such time as we can efficiently
mobilize a mailing effort to send you a renewal notice, we will
accept $9 for one year and $18 for two years. These lower
prices are our way of thanking those of you who save us the
effort of sending you a renewal notice.
We're proud of the value that we pack into Softline and
we have fun making the magazine. All of us hope you'll
choose to share that fun with us for another year.
Sincerely,
Al Tommervik, Publisher
Margot Comstock Tommervik, Editor
Ken Williams, Associate Publisher
Andrew Christie, Co-Editor
Kurt Wahlner, Art. Director
2
SOFTLINE
Directline
Capturing the Elusive Asterisk
All that is required to do text or graphics printouts from copy-
protected games is a monitor ROM switch (the red one) on a firm-
ware card, and a printer that can be controlled without the use of
special driver routines. First flip the switch, then press reset. You're
back into Basic (a control-C or a control-B) and can then execute
the necessary printout commands. Also, isn't Bob Bishop's new
game called Dung Beetles rather than Tumblebugsl
Jordan Weinstein, Woodside, CA
Message received, Jordan. Nice work (if you can get it). And
yes, it was called Dung Beetles. Evidently the name was not con-
sidered sufficiently, uh, marketable.
Hi-Res Multicolor
I own an Apple II Plus. It has been my impression that a shape
table drawing is always drawn in the one current hi-res color, but I
have begun to see some table shapes that are in two or more col-
ors. How is this done?
Lyle VerPlanck, Costa Mesa, CA
You can create shape tables on the Apple that contain up to
three colors, but there are some limitations. First, the color will
be lost if the scale is larger than 1 or if rotation is anything but 0
(right side up) or 32 (upside down). Second, certain factors may
conspire to change the color displayed.
There are two important principles behind color shapes. The
first is that a shape table, when scale equals 1 and rot equals 0, is
a set of instructions for the computer to plot individual dots in a
distinct pattern. The second is that the Apple II displays colors
when every other dot (horizontally) is on, black when all are off,
and white when all are on. Thus, within a single shape, one area
can be made green by plotting only on odd X coordinates,
another area can be blue by plotting only on even X coordi-
nates, and a third area can be white by plotting on all X coordi-
nates.
Now about those conspiring factors. If with scale = 1, rot = 0,
and hcolor = 3, you draw the shape at 140,80, it will come out as
planned. If you draw it at 141,80, it will have its greens and blues
switched. If you set hcolor = 7 (white2), the shape will have
oranges and violets where its greens and blues were. In other
words, you can have color in shape tables, but you have to be
careful where and how you draw them.
Cracking the Egg
I need help. In Zork I, how do you get the egg open and finish
the adventure? In Zork II, how do you get behind the menhir, or
get through the door with the lizard head?
Derek Bosch, Williamsville, NY
Write to Zork User Group about their book of invisiclues for
the first Zork; they're at Box 20923, Milwaukee, Wl 53220.
And about getting through that door, remember: you can
catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.
Riddle Me This
I would appreciate hearing from any Wizardry fans who have
solved the riddle that is asked before the door at level six in Knight
of Diamonds.
D. K. Ullman, Santa Ana, CA
Savory Smail a la Modem
It was just a few weeks ago that I first saw a copy of Softline,
dedicated to one of my sore weaknesses in life: computer games.
One of the first articles I happened to turn to in Softline was
"Modem Gamesmanship" by Roe R. Adams III, which describes,
among other things, the Post Games bulletin board service on the
Source. Lo and behold, the first notice listed is from one TCP072.
Well, you guessed it, that's me!
Just to follow up on Mr. Adams's article, after I posted that notice
about Mystery House I received about a dozen replies by Smail
(nickname for the electronic mail service available to all Source sub-
scribers) offering all manner of hints, answers, and advice. An in-
teresting sidelight to this is the fact that after the article in Softline, I
now receive Smail letters every week. They say, "Gee, I saw you in
Softline. I'm in the same situation! Can you give me a hand?" I am
more than happy to respond. In fact, I'd love to talk to anyone about
Mystery House, or Apple Adventure, or any other game I've
played. My current passion, by the way, is Wizardry.
Steve Pisk, New Britain, CT
Incontrovertibly Atari
I enjoyed Journey to the Planet Pincus in the May Softline. I
thought you might be interested in how I converted this program to
Atari Basic.
Line 15: GRAPHICS 0: REM CLEAR THE SCREEN
Line 35: Change A$(12) to D$(1). String arrays are not used in
this version, and D$ must be dimensioned.
Lines 50-65: Delete these lines.
Line 80: Read N, S, E, W, D, U
Atari Basic does not read arrays out of data statements directly.
Line 82: N(A)=N:S(A)=S:E(A) = E:W(A) = W:D(A)=D:U(A)=U
Line 240: On R gosub 2010, 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, 2070,
2080, 2090, 2100, 2110, 2120
These are the room description subroutines.
Line 245: ?: ? "Direction)”;: input D$:?
Lines 250- 360: Change left$(D$,1) to D$.
Lines 2010- 2120: Change data to ? and place return at the end
of each message. Some messages will have to be placed on more
than one line.
Stuart Pierce, Picayune, MS
Message from Middle Earth
Regarding the book Ken Rose cited in May Softline, entitled
From Here to There and Back Again, I would like to be the one to
tell you that it is not Frodo's book at all, but his Uncle Bilbo's. If
other Tolkien fans see this I am sure that more letters will be forth-
coming.
James Brown, Chicago, IL
Authoritative Relations
I refer to a letter written by Geoffrey Puterbaugh of Sunnyvale,
California, "Copyrights and Wrongs" [May 1982], more particularly
to the last paragraph which mentions Wizardry, published by Sir-
tech. The following should be of interest to your readers, including
Mr. Puterbaugh.
Wizardry was designed and coauthored with Mr. Woodhead by
Mr. Andrew Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg has contributed to fantasy
role-playing on Plato and in other previous fantasy role-playing
games, Moria being one of the descendents. Mr. Woodhead is the
author of a fantasy role-playing game on that system named Sor-
cery, now more than five years old. The original prototype of Wiz-
ardry preceded the appearance of Moria by a number of months.
It is regrettable that Mr. Puterbaugh, while being interested in
Mr. Woodhead's opinions, was not interested enough to ask and
saw fit to pose the question in a form that verges on libel.
F. B. Sirotek, president, Sir-tech, Ogdensberg, NY
as
SEPTEMBER 1982
3
WE’RE WRITING
WE CAN!
At the rate we’re going,
we’ll have these pages
filled by 2083. And by
2084, people will be
clamoring for the next
Infocom creation.
We hate to disappoint our
public. So we keep you waiting.
Because while the software facto-
ries are cranking out arcade game
after arcade game, pulpy adven-
ture after trite fantasy, we’re
writing and rewriting, honing and
perfecting. Before a single person
enters one of Infocom’s worlds,
it must be crafted into a living,
riveting, definitive experience.
Judging from the public’s reac-
tion, it’s worth the wait. For
instance, Creative Computing
welcomed DEADLINE” as
“thoroughly engrossing and real-
istic,” while a Softalk readers’
poll recently voted ZORK'" I and
ZORK II the most popular adven-
tures of 1981.
And now, for the moment, your
wait is over. ZORK III, your final
step in the underground
trilogy, and STARCROSS,™
an exploration of a new
dimension in science fiction,
are ready for you.
Look at them up there,
the little worlds of Infocom. As
our universe expands, compan-
ions will come to help fill that vast
expanse of white space. Till
then, they’ll continue to stand
alone as the best of all possible
worlds.
inFOCOIR
55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Infocom’s worlds are available for Apple? Atari? IBM, TRS-80? Commodore, NEC, Osborne, CP/M? and DEC."
Apple is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Atari is a registered trademark of Atari, Inc. TRS-80 is a registered trademark of Tandy Corporation.
CP/M is a registered trademark of Digital Research, Inc. DEC is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation.
You already know Jim Nitchals, even if you don't know who
he is.
He was that kid in school that teachers looked at and thought,
"He could really be something if he'd only apply himself."
He's that superstar at the office who turned down a promotion
so he could keep doing what he likes doing and what he's good at.
He's the basketball player who sets up the play and feeds the ball
to the center who slams it.
If Nitchals had been in The Empire Strikes Back, he wouldn't
have been Han Solo; he would have been Yoda — an unimposing
character, yet the one closest to the Force. But that's the movies.
In real life, Nitchals is the force behind Cavalier Computer, in
Del Mar, California.
For a guy whose extracurricular activities at Torrey Pines High
School were the science fiction and chess clubs and who loathed
schoolwork so much that he took a proficiency examination to fin-
ish early ("I never received my diploma, but I did get a certificate
that said I was proficient"), Jim Nitchals isn't doing too badly.
Now twenty years old, Nitchals has programmed five games for
the Apple, four of which spent a total of nine months in Softalk ' s
Top Thirty. The fifth, Ring Raiders, was offered free by mail during
December 1981 and found more than three thousand takers.
His company, the publisher of such Apple winners as Bug At-
tack and Microwave, is raking in close to two hundred thousand
dollars a year, and hopes to surpass that very soon.
Nitchals and his fellow programmers at Cavalier have standard-
ized T-shirts and shorts as the official programmers' uniform — ap-
propriate for the southern California company. Business execs who
earn what Nitchals makes can't boast that luxury.
And what of Nitchals's peers in high school who shunned and
ostracized him as a computer junkie? While they're struggling to get
the necessary prerequisites for their college majors and agonizing
over final examinations, Nitchals's biggest task is deciding whether
to design a game for keyboard or paddles.
Beginning on Brand X. Strangely enough, a Radio Shack elec-
tronics kit was Nitchals's first experience with technology. At thir-
teen he began creating circuits for small electronic devices, one of
which was a short-wave receiver. Fiddling with these steered his in-
terest to ham radio. It was through catalogs and circulars from the
electronics store that Nitchals began hearing about microproc-
essors.
Working with a friend from his math class, Nitchals started de-
signing computers and programs of his own. By the tenth grade,
he'd landed a job doing the same sort of work at a Del Mar re-
search and development firm.
Later that summer, he went to work for Micro Works, a produc-
er of digital television cameras for the Apple. At that time, Micro
Works didn't know a whole lot about the Apple and neither did Nit-
chals. But this didn't pose a great problem; his first hi-res program
was an Apple first, too: the first program written for the Apple that
scanned a television screen and produced a video image printout.
Nitchals claims to be the first person ever to have a self-portrait
taken by an Apple.
While other kids were at practice for after-school sports, Nit-
chals was at practice with the Apple at his local computer store,
which was anything but local. "I wasn't able to drive yet, so I had to
take the bus fifteen miles into San Diego," Nitchals recalls. There he
began experimenting with the computer, getting in some hands-on
experience and even helping out customers once in a while.
Now, you'd assume that someone so adept at and interested in
electronic technology was probably a lot like those brainy kids you
knew in high school. They came in two types: those who studied all
the time and did nothing but hit the books, and those natural Uni-
vacs who never applied themselves and still landed in the high end
of the grade curve. Nitchals was neither one.
"I had heard that some people actually were hitting the books,
but I found that fifteen minutes a day would do it. The problem was
that I didn't want to spend even that much time," he explains. "I
took two years of physics and hadn't received even a semester's
worth of credit. The class was 'go at your own pace,' and for methat
meant 'go nowhere.' " And yet that's when Nitchals started to go
somewhere.
S O F T L I N E
Photo by Tom Martin
Learning Business Administration 101 in Physics 2. It was in that
class that Nitchals met Rick Moore and Barry Printz, cofounders with
Nitchals of Cavalier. " I wanted to build some interface cards for the
Apple. When I mentioned the idea to them, Rick told me he had an
Apple II, and Barry had the backing to handle the business end,"
says Nitchals. "We first thought to call the company 'Three Musket-
eers,' and from that came 'Cavalier.' "
Nitchals's first work for Cavalier came as a part-time endeavor. In
the summer of 1980, he picked up a consulting job and designed an
interface card for the IBM Selectric, a card that is still selling today.
Using Moore's Apple, Nitchals was writing Asteroid Field on the
side. "We were all fans of the Asteroids arcade game," Nitchals says,
"and we weren't sure if we could handle designing hardware. So
the most obvious thing to do was to write the game for the Apple.
"At the time, I had never seen a hi-res game on the Apple, and I
felt confident I could produce something better than the games that
were selling." Nitchals was right. On November 16, 1980, he took
Asteroid Field to a user group meeting and sold fifteen copies on
the spot.
When Nitchals's second game, Star Thief, came out, the objec-
tive for the company was for all to make some money and then go
their separate ways. However, Printz started seeing the pot at the end
of the rainbow and convinced Nitchals there was no point in stop-
ping there.
There is no doubt, with bestsellers like Star Thief, Bug Attack,
and Nitchals's latest, Microwave, that Cavalier Computer is doing
well financially. But that doesn't necessarily make Nitchals a rich
man. "I take only as much as I need to keep up a modest lifestyle.
That includes paying rent, driving a beat-up 76 Chevette, and sup-
porting my eating-out habits." Nitchals doesn't like to cook and nei-
ther does his sister, with whom he shares his home. "That means I
eat out quite often."
Born to Program. Nitchals's involvement in the administrative
aspects of Cavalier is now almost nonexistent, and that's fine with
him. He'd rather program and help teach others how to program,
though he admits that he's not really emotionally suited to being a
teacher. "Sometimes I have to yell it into them."
The rewards Nitchals receives for being a mentor are more in-
trinsic than financial. Despite the strain on his patience, it gives him a
chance to see others in the same position he was in a few years ago,
learning the same things he was learning, only with a little more
help. His working with programmers at Cavalier, Nitchals feels,
makes their jobs a bit easier.
"I don't know of many other companies where aid is available at
all times for programmers. Of course, there are exceptions. Ken
Williams and Doug Carlston are great; though their main occupa-
tion is business, they can still take time with the programmers. My
main occupation is programming, so I try to spend as much time
with Jay [Zimmerman] and Mike [Abbott] as I can."
Nitchals sees himself becoming even less involved in the busi-
ness administration aspect of Cavalier as time goes on. Though he
already has a grasp of what makes a business work, he'd rather write
a program to add up a column of numbers than add them up
himself.
Nitchals claims not to have the personality for business and ne-
gotiations, but he does have a very definite personality that makes it-
self apparent through his games.
While other game writers were developing ways for us to shoot
aliens and enemy spaceships, Nitchals's Bug Attack had us shoot-
ing at ants, butterflies, and millipedes while being serenaded by an
old campfire song, "The ants go marching two by two, hurrah,
hurrah. . . ."
In Microwave, the music Nitchals chose to accompany the maze
game included the theme from the Star Wars cantina and a chase
tune from Keystone Cops flicks. In this game, which Nitchals co-
wrote with Zimmerman, the hero is not a warrior, he doesn't fly a
spaceship, and his mission is not to kill things to score points. He is
Teddy the Salvageman, a teddy bear in overalls. His only weapon is
used for defense, and his mission is to go around picking up calcu-
lators, hammers, and other assorted objects in order to repair his
spaceship.
"We were all at Jay's house one night working on shapes and
characters for Microwave, and the teddy bear was the cutest look-
ing shape at the time, so we just stuffed him in there, and it worked
and looked good," explains Nitchals.
For a programmer who chooses things because they're cute, it
comes as little surprise that one of Nitchals's favorite games is
Sneakers, for the sound effects when bonus points are awarded, its
variety of characters, and its general pleasantness. "With those little
smily faces on the sneakers, it has a bright, colorful, cheerful way
about it."
Is There Life after Twenty? Nitchals is young even by program-
mers' standards. His high school classmates are trying to devise ways
of becoming millionaires by the time they're thirty. Nitchals wants to
make it by twenty-five. "If I can't find it in programming games, I'll
find something else that's more profitable," he projects. "But it has
to be fun. Right now it's just for fun, and I want to keep it that way."
What does a twenty-year-old game programmer who's the cen-
ter of a successful company do in his spare time? No, it's not push-
ing big bucks into high-style entertainment and fast living but, rath-
er, pushing quarters into his favorite video arcade machines: Ms.
Pac-Man, Tempest, and Tron, a game for which he held the high
score in the San Diego area.
If he's not in the arcades, you might find him engaging in other
favorite pastimes: riding the bumper boats at the local miniature
golf park or at home listening to the Police, Styx, Elton John, Heart,
or the Electric Light Orchestra.
Nitchals is a simple person with not much to distinguish him
from the next person his age — except for his considerable accom-
plishments at Cavalier. A person who is as softspoken as his games
are entertaining, he enjoys what he's doing and sees no reason to
change. §9
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SEPTEMBER 1982
7
Screenwriter II . .
. . .84.95
1st Class Mail . .
. . . 59.95
DB Master
. .154.95
Time Zone
. . . 69.95
Wizardry
. . .36.95
Hi-Res Golf
. . .18.95
Lisa 2.5
. . .58.95
Locksmith 4.1 .. .
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Need a 2nd Drive?
Micro Sci A2
• 100% Apple Compatible
• Fast-Reliable Operation
• Easy on the wallet
$349
Choplifter
Frogger
Centipede (cart)
Ghost Hunter (case) .
Gorf
Canyon Climber
MasterType
IBM
Deadline
Zork I or II
WordStar
Write-on
Visicalc
Frogger
Temple of Apshai
Home Accountant +
Championship Blackjack . . .
Supercalc
TG Joystick
Call to Arms
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• If you don’t have one, it's
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$494
Interface w/cable $119
GAMES, Etc.
Retail
Price
Snave's
Audex
29.95
21.95
Bag of Tricks
39.95
29.95
Bandits
34.95
24.95
Borg
29.95
21.95
Bug Attack
29.95
21.95
Castle Wolfenstein
29.95
21.95
Choplifter
34.95
24.95
Crossfire
29.95
21.95
Cyborg
32.95
24.95
David's Midnight Magic ....
34.95
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Deadline
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Pac-Man Champ:
Ready on the Set
At fifteen, Matthew Laborteaux already has significant accom-
plishments to be proud of. He plays Albert Ingalls on "Little House
on the Prairie," and, with a score of 1,200,000, he's the national Pac-
Man champion.
He took the title April 25 in a warehouse in Santa Monica
stocked with Pac-Man machines provided by the tournament's
sponsor, People magazine. Last October, he placed tenth in the
Centipede playoffs at the Atari world championships in Chicago.
Laborteaux did not attain his current level of expertise over-
night. He started with the early Pong games and got a video car-
tridge system when they were first introduced; but he found the
games insufficiently challenging. Wandering back to the arcades, he
witnessed the birth of Space Invaders and Asteroids, but he wasn't
really hooked until Missile Command.
"It's probably my best game. I enjoy it— that type of action— a bit
more than Pac-Man," Laborteaux says. But the maze game, in its
current and most bizarre form, is still close to his heart: "My favor-
ite right now is Dig Dug. I tried to get into Zaxxon, but it was just
too hard."
And that's a problem. "Once you've got the patterns down, a
game is easy. Then they come out with harder games and it takes
longer than the standard two minutes of playing time even to fig-
ure out how to play. You have to keep plugging in quarters just to
see what the game is."
Like many arcade fans with a finite supply of quarters but higher
standards for graphics and animation than home game machines
can deliver, Laborteaux is gravitating toward a personal computer.
He has taken a course in the Apple II, and, due to his ongoing suc-
cess with Atari's products, he's considering the purchase of an
Atari 800.
In the meantime he has his own personal Pac-Man arcade ma-
chine — the spoils of victory — and a plaque commemorating his feat.
And he has time to get in shape to meet the inevitable challeng-
ers who'll want to see just how fast he really is. 31
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SEPTEMBER 1982
9
It's a bright and sunny day. You're walking along the street to the
store when suddenly a giant pit opens up under your feet, and you
tumble head over heels two thousand feet down into the ground,
splashing into a vast subterranean lake. Coughing and gasping, you
fight your way to the surface and swim frantically for the shore of an
island that's less than a hundred feet from you. You're more than
halfway there when a giant water snake bursts through the surface
and grabs you. . . .
Sound familiar? Let's hope not; it's made up. But that's beside
the point, said point being overhype, or overdramatization. Much
of what goes on in game software is overpublicized, overrated, or
overcriticized. Credit where credit is due, yes; but there is a shady
area where the ignorance of the public blends in with the natural
wish of an author for recognition, and this puts an aura of mystique
around things that don't quite deserve it; people then say, "Wow,
that's neat, but I could never do that."
Not so. And we'll show you one case, if you'll follow along quiet-
ly so as not to disturb Gadanya, jealous keeper of the crypt of
algorithms.
You're Moving through Another Dimension. We live in a three-
dimensional world (well, perhaps more, but that's clouding the pic-
ture). Yet merely by closing one eye, we can erase the usual third di-
mension, forcing ourselves to infer it from contrast and shading and
perspective, a task most of us perform fairly well. The ephemeral na-
ture of our depth perception, joined with our historic desire to rep-
resent three dimensions where there are only two — in paintings,
architectural drawings, horror movies, and Viewmaster slides— has
made us masters of illusion. As we advance in the field of computer
graphics, it's not surprising that we should quickly take on the chal-
lenge to create three dimensions on the computer.
How? We can take a couple of the tricks that artists have learned
during the last few hundred years, apply them, and see what we get.
Let's try shading, contrast, and perspective. Now let's pick some-
thing to put them in. Something that's popular and nifty. Some-
thing that's not too hard, because we're all a bit lazy. Something like
a 3-D maze plotter. Yeah, that sounds good.
Well, let's set some limits because, after all, we have a limited
medium to work with. The maze (underground dungeon, house,
whatever) will be composed of right-angle tunnels all of the same
size, and made of a boringly perfect substance. The only remark-
able feature for now will be doors, sans doorknobs (well, you know
how easily they break off; besides, the original planning estimate
didn't include cost overruns, so the Kobolds left the extras out). And
we'll do no shading or other fancy things like that that eat up time
and memory.
The basic idea is one of perspective; the farther away something
is, the smaller it looks. Eventually, we reach a vanishing point, where
objects that stretch out far enough converge to a point as we see it;
for an example, we'll look at a corridor. Observe the illuminating
figure 1. The picture is that of two parallel rows of blocks dwindling
off into the distance; note that the point at which they converge is
still within the picture frame. It's possible for the vanishing point to
be out of the picture or for there to be more than one vanishing
point, but, again, let's not get too complicated right away, okay?
Let's get down to juggling a few electrons along silicon-metal
pathways. Objects right in front are full size; something very far
away is, for all practical purposes, no size at all; and in between
those two extremes an object's size is inversely proportional to its
distance from the front. Let's do more simplifying, keeping in mind
that computers prefer things to go in multiples of two. If the object
is halfway to the vanishing point, it'll be half size. Three-fourths of
the way there, and it'll be one-quarter its beginning size. Seven-
eighths of the way there, it'll be one-eighth normal size. And so on.
This gives us our first bit of concrete math:
(shrinking factor) = 1 - (distance to vanishing point /distance to
the front)
10
S O F T L I N E
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
The Root of the Corridor Cubed. Now we need to draw some
more pictures and see if we can derive some plotting equations
from them. Let's make things even easier. Our corridors will be in
cube segments, say eight by eight by eight feet (ten foot cubes are
so pedestrian, don't you think?); this gives us an easy angle on the
perspective and proportion.
Look at figure 2 and pretend that you see a corridor stretching
off into the distance. The vertical lines are there to help you pre-
tend; each one marks off one of those eight by eight by eight foot
cubes, and each wall panel is eight by eight feet. Now type this
Applesoft quickie into the Apple and run it:
10 HGR : HCOLOR= 1
20 XI = 41 : X2 = 169 : Y1 = 15: Y2 = 143 : CX = 105 : CY = 79
30 HPLOT XI, Y1 TO X2,Y1 TO XI, Y2 TO X2,Y2 TO XI, Y1
40 HPLOT XI, Y1 TO X1,Y2 : HPLOT X2,Y1 TO X2,Y2
50 XI = (XI + CX)/2 : X2 = (X2 + CX)/2 : Y1 = (Y1 + CY)/2:
Y2 = (Y2 + CY)/2
60 GOTO 40
Amazing, isn't it? All right, you're only slightly impressed, but
we've taken a small step on the way and introduced even more sim-
plifications. The vanishing point is in the center of the screen; thus,
all the lines that vanish to the center are forty-five degree lines, and
that simplifies our math tremendously.
Now, what math have we done so far? We have a center, and we
have left and right wall panels that converge toward it. Each panel is
half the size of the one before it, and each panel stretches halfway
to the center. Look at figure 3 as we introduce some more math.
XI, Y1 through X4,Y4 form the outer boundaries of the two
panels, left and right, and X5,Y5 through X8,Y8 form the inner
boundaries; CX,CY is the center vanishing point. Drawing the left
right panels is easy enough.
Left panel:
HPLOT XI, Y1 TO X5,Y5 TO X8,Y8 TO X4,Y4 TO XI, Y1
Right panel:
HPLOT X2,Y2 TO X6,Y6 TO X7,Y7 TO X3,Y3 TO X2,Y2
But what about the next set of panels? And the next, and so on?
And where do all the variables come from?
Y Not? XI, Y1 to X4,Y4 are predefined; we have to start some-
where. They form the outer window within which everything is
drawn. And (listen!!) X5,Y5 to X8,Y8 are calculated from XI, Y1 -
X4,Y4 and CX,CY. How? Easy. If each panel goes half the remaining
distance to the center, then, for example, X5 is:
X5 = XI + (CX - X1)/2 = (XI + CX)/2
where (CX - XI) is the distance from XI to CX. We divide that by
two, and add it to XI to find X5, and, presto chango, we've got it.
The others come similarly:
Y5 = Y1 + (CY - Y1)/2 = (Y1 + CY)/2
X6 = X2 - (X2 - CX)/2 = (X2 + CX)/2
X6 = Y2 + (CY - Y2)/2 = (Y2 + CY)/2
X7 = X3 — (X3 - CX)/2 = (X3 + CX)/2
Y7 = Y3 — (Y3 — CY)/2 = (Y3 + CY)/2
X8 = X4 + (CX - X4)/2 = (X4 + CX)/2
Y8 = Y4 - (Y4 - CY)/2 = (Y4 + CY)/2
To interject a note from an efficiency-minded world, XI and X4 are
the same, X2 and X3 the same, Y1 and Y2 the same, and Y3 and Y4
are also the same. It's just easier to use them all when thinking about
this. So X5 and X8, X6 and X7, Y5 and Y6, and Y7 and Y8 are also
Figure 4.
going to be the same. If you're still here, we actually only need to
calculate X5, X6, Y5, and Y 7 and get the others from them:
X8 = X5 : X7 = X6 : Y6 = Y5 : Y8 = Y7
"Now, Thumper, what did your father say?" "Which one? Oh,
yeah; waste not, want not." So, once we've drawn the first set of
panels, we can recycle the variables for the next set of panels, thusly:
XI = X5 : Y1 = Y5 : X2 = X6 : Y2 = Y6
X3 = X7 : Y3 = Y7 : X4 = X8 : Y4 = Y8
and then recalculate a new set of X5,Y5 . . . X8,Y8 and keep on
going.
Easy? Easy. Well, what if a panel is missing? (Call the police.) For
one, we don't draw it. But that just leaves a hole, and to complete
the picture we should draw what's behind the missing panel. To
make things easy on us (again), we'll just draw the forward wall of
the next cube over, if there is a forward wall. So look at figure 4, and
we'll discuss drawing those left and right forward walls.
Start with the left missing panel and the front wall behind it (a
front or forward facing wall is one that is staring us full in the face,
not slanted to one side or t'other). We draw it like this:
HPLOT X1,Y5 TO X5,Y5 TO X8,Y8 TO XI, Y8
And the one on the right side will be drawn as:
HPLOT X2,Y6 TO X6,Y6 TO X7,Y7 TO X2,Y7
Wasn't that fun? You in the front, say yes. Now let's do some in-
teresting things. Corridors sometimes end, don't they? And doors
are usually convenient things, so we should add those. First, let's
have that corridor end. Look back to figure 4. The corridor ended;
oh no, what do we do? Square it off, of course. That would be after
an iteration of left-right panel drawing, so the end would be:
HPLOT X5,Y5 TO X6,Y6 TO X7,Y 7 TO X8,Y8 TO X5,Y5
Got it? Good. If you don't have it, we're all in trouble. That's quite
enough of that.
Getting Around. Now for the doors (the Beatles come later). Ah,
doors, those perhaps magical portals to other places and times (yeah,
five seconds later on the other side of the silly door). Please to refer
to figure 5.
We have three kinds of doors to draw: doors on a side panel,
doors on a front facing wall, and a door at the end of a corridor. The
last shall be first, because it's the easiest. So how should it go? A door
is going to have some margin between the left and right sides of the
wall it's on and some margin from the top of the wall to the top of
the door. Let us give some assignments. YV is the margin from the
top of the wall to the top of the door, and XV is the margin from the
left side of the wall to the left side of the door and also the margin
from the right side of the wall to the right side of the door. Observe
figure 5a for enlightenment.
SEPTEMBER 1982
11
The equation for that door is:
HPLOT X5 + XV, Y8 TO X5 + XV, Y5 + YV TO X6 - XV, Y5 +
YV TO X6 - XV, Y7
And so on we trek to the next door, one on a front facing wall, and
you should cast an inquiring eye on figure 5b. Since we only see half
of the wall, we're only going to see half of the door, and the two
plots look like so:
Left door:
HPLOT X8 - XV, Y8 TO X5 - XV, Y5 + YV TO X1,Y5 + YV
Right door:
HPLOT X7 + XV, Y7 TO X7 + XV, Y6 +YV TO X2,Y6 + YV
Not too terribly complicated, is it? You'd better say no, because this
next part is a little complicated — but fun.
Look at figure 5c. Don't wince; look at it. Scary, isn't it? It
needn't be; and we'll endeavor to make this at least painless.
First, let's pull a fact out of the air. In a right triangle with an acute
angle of forty-five degrees, the two sides next to the right angle are
of equal length, so if you know the length of one side, you then
X5, Y5 X6,Y6
X7, Y7
Figure 5a.
possess the terrible secret of the length of the other side. Now, no-
tice that in figure 5c four right triangles are pointed out; since all
the lines form angles of forty-five degrees, we have most of the
knowledge needed to draw the door encoded in the picture. Let's
dig it out.
The lower left-hand coordinates of the door are X4 + XV, Y4 -
XV. That's simple enough. The upper left-hand coordinates are XI -
XV, Y1 + YV + XV. Check to make sure you understand that. Now,
the upper right-hand side of the door is X5 - XV, Y5 + YV - XV, be-
cause we add the YV but have to back up by the amount XV up the
Y axis. And, finally, the lower right-hand side is X8 - XV, Y8 + XV.
String it all together and we get:
Left door (side panel):
HPLOT X4 + XV, Y4 - XV TO XI + XV, Y1 + YV + XV TO X5 -
XV, Y5 + YV - XV TO X8 - XV, Y8 +XV
The right door is similarly (tortuously):
Right door (side panel):
HPLOT X3 - XV, Y3 - XV TO X2 - XV, Y2 +YV + XV TO X6 +
XV, Y6 + YV - XV TO X7 + XV, Y7 +XV
And there we have it, all the math we get for now.
Get Back in Your Cell. Therefore, on to the program I But, be-
fore that, we have to mention something nasty, so close your ears,
data structures.
A maze plotter is actually pretty useless without a maze to plot
(but it looks so elegant and pretty!), so we need a way of repre-
senting a maze in the machine. Again, let's be easy and make the
maze in those chunks. Then we can turn the maze into a matrix, and
each cell of the matrix will have a number describing how that eight
by eight by eight foot cube looks; where the walls are, and where
the doors are. So we have a matrix, A%(100,100), say. It's pretty large,
and it's full of integer numbers. Each number has five parts: one for
each of the four directions, north, east, south, and west, and a spe-
cial number, which we'll put off until later. Now, delving a bit into
machine language origins, an integer number is sixteen bits long. So
we give each of the directions three bits, and the special number
gets four bits. If this all seems meaningless, be patient, because now
we'll come back to reality.
This means that a cell edge can be one of eight things. Right
now, there are three. They are:
0 wall
1 empty space
2 door
To put a cell number together, do this:
cell# = (special) *4096 + (north type)*512 + (east type)*64 +
(south type) *8 + (west type)
For example, the cell number for a cell with a wall to the north,
doors to the east and west, and space to the south would be:
cell # = (0 * 4096) + (0 * 512) + (2 * 64) + (1 * 8) +2 = 138.
The program, of course, has to be able to reverse this, and there's a
subroutine at 1600 that does this; XX, YY is the address of the cell you
wish to explode into full form. A discussion of that is for later, also.
So, here at last is the program, and nothing can stop it! Cast an
eye on the listing, and read along.
Lines 10 through 80 set up few global variables needed and set
up the maze in the matrix A% (100,1 00). D is the direction you face in
the maze: 1 = north, 2 = east, 3 = south, 4 = west. XC,YC are the
coordinates of the cell you're standing in. RR is the depth the corri-
dor (or room or whatever) is drawn to; it's impractical actually to try
to draw to infinity.
Lines 90 through 130 print the direction you're facing, and the
cell you're in. Simple enough. Then line 140 sets up the depth
counter and calls the actual maze plotter subroutine.
Lines 190 through 260 ask which direction you'd like to move,
and then branch to a likely area to move or turn you, as the case
may be. The keys used are:<- (turn left), - >(turn right), +; (move
forward one step), and ?/ (move backward one step).
Lines 270 through 400 are the bits of code that change the direc-
tion and/or XY coordinates; simple enough. Lines 410 through 430
are a teleport (why not?),; push T.
12
S O F T L I N E
Figure 6a. Figure 6b.
Lines 1000 through 1840 are the maze plotter and ancillary sub-
routines. But hold it; there's one last thing, and, really, only one, that
we need to discuss. The burning topic that couldn't be held back
any longer is: peripheral vision. "Oh," you say, "but how does
that . . .?" Stop! Don't commit yourself. Just read this.
We can plot ahead of us, and to either side of that, but what of
the cell we're standing in? Do we cop out and say, "Well, I'm stand-
ing on the very frontmost edge of the cell I'm in, and consequently
can't see anything of it?" No. No. NO! Let's be a bit more classy, and
draw just a bit of the cell we're in, tacking that on to the outside of
the window that everything else is in. Look at figures 6a and 6b, and
decide which you like better. But pick 6b anyway, okay? Good.
This creates a bit of a problem, because the first bit is a special
case and needs special treatment in spots. So we'll explain all that as
it comes up.
1000 clear the hi-res screen and set color to green
1010-1020 set up special case coordinates for peripheral vision
cell
1030-1040 set up normal outer window coordinates
1050 define the center coordinates
1060 set up special case XV and YV
1070 get starting cell coordinates
1080 skip recalculating of X5,Y5 . . . X8,Y8 the first time
around
1090-1130 calculate X5,Y5 . . . X8,Y8 and XV, YV
1140-1150 get left wall number; if space, goto left wall extend
1160 if not door, then skip door plot
1170 if not first cell (peripheral) then skip special case
1180 plot peripheral left panel door and skip to 1200
1190 plot left panel door
1200-1220 plot left panel wall and goto right side plot
1230 get cell to the left of current cell; if no front-facing
wall, skip to right side plot
1240 if no door, then skip door plot
1241 if not peripheral cell, then skip special case
1242-1243 plot peripheral left-facing door and skip to 1260
1250 plot left front-facing door
1260 plot left front-facing wall
1270-1390 repeat the same thing, but for the right side instead
1400-1410 reset XI, Y1 . . . X4,Y4 to start of next panels
1420-1430 if the cell just plotted has a forward wall, then goto
1500 to finish off the plot
1440-1470 otherwise, get the address of the next cell in the
direction D
1480 if depth counter has reached zero, then end
1490 otherwise, go back to 1090, recalculate X5,Y5 . . .
X8,Y8 and keep going
1500 square off the end of the corridor
1510 if no door then skip door plot
1520 get appropriate XV and YV
1530 make the door
1540 return from maze plotter
1600-1700 expand the cell at XX, YY to the four directions and
special number
1800-1840 get address of cell in direction P from the cell at X,Y
3000-3190 set up the maze in matrix A%(100,100)
Wasn't that just ever so? So type it in, or get some other hapless
wight to do that for you, and run it. No! What's a fir . . . next loop?
Got it fixed? Good.
After you've run the program a bit, you may begin to think that
it's not quite all perfect, and you'd be perfectly justified in thinking
that (nasty of you, but justified). What's wrong with it? Well, for one,
we're drawing a very narrow picture, one that extends straight out in
front of us and just barely to the right or left, and that gives funny re-
sults at times— anytime that we look into a space that's bigger than
one cell. Also, it looks a bit barren, with only doors to ornament the
long, lonely tunnels.
Will the open space problem be fixed? Will there ever be any-
thing but doors in our maze? Will Conan, erstwhile King of
Cimmeria, ever find his way into the maze? Will you ever get out?
Will there be another part to this article to explain everything we've
mentioned but put off until far too late? Only time can answer those
questions.
This article is brought to you in part by the formation of the
Earth, an event that led indirectly to my being here.
10 LOMEM: 16384
20 DIM A%(1 00,100)
30 HOME
40 VTAB 10: HTAB 6: PRINT "THE MOUNDS OF CTEIA"
50 REM ********** MAZE: 3D -PLOTTER
60 GOSUB 3000
70 D = 2:XC = 1:YC = 1:RR = 5
80 SP = 0
90 HOME : VTAB 23: HTAB 35: IF D = 1 THEN PRINT "N";
100 IF D = 2 THEN PRINT "E"
110 IF D = 3 THEN PRINT "S"
120 IF D = 4 THEN PRINT "W"
130 VTAB 24: HTAB 20: PRINT XC;" ";YC;
140 R = RR: GOSUB 1000
190 VTAB 22: HTAB 1: PRINT "MOVE >
FCraf^puts^you Vi command With high
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200
VTAB 22: HTAB 7: GET A$
210
IF A$ = CHR$ (8) THEN 270
220
IF A$ = CHR$ (21) THEN 290
230
IF A$ = THEN 310
240
IF A$ = "T" THEN 410
250
IF A$ = "/" THEN 330
260
GOTO 200
270
D = D — 1:IFD = 0 THEN D = 4
280
GOTO 90
290
D = D + 1:IFD = 5 THEN D = 1
300
GOTO 90
310
XX = XC:YY = YC: GOSUB 1600: P =
THEN 350
D: IF T(D) < > 0
320
PRINT CHR$ (7): GOTO 200
330
XX = XC:YY = YC: GOSUB 1600: P =
IF P < 1 THEN P = P + 4
D - 2: PRINT P:
340
IF T(P) = 0 THEN 320
350
SP = 0
360
IF P = 1 THEN YC = YC - 1
370
IF P = 2 THEN XC = XC + 1
380
IF P = 3 THEN YC = YC + 1
390
IF P = 4 THEN XC = XC - 1
400
GOTO 90
410
HOME : VTAB 22: HTAB 1
420
INPUT "TELEPORT TO (X,Y) ";XC,YC
430
GOTO 90
1000
HGR : HCOLOR= 1
1010
XI = 27.Y1 = 1:X2 = 183:Y2 = 1
1020
X3 = 183:Y3 = 157:X4 = 27:Y4 = 157
1030
X5 = 41 :Y5 = 15:X6 = 169:Y6 = 15
1040
X7 = 169:Y7 = 143:X8 = 41:Y8 = 143
1050
CX = 105 :CY = 79
1060
XV = 2:YV = 18
1070
X = XC:Y = YC
1080 GOTO 1140
1090 X5 = (XI + CX) / 2:X8 = X5
1100 X6 = (X2 + CX) / 2:X7 = X6
1110 Y5 = (Y1 + CY) / 2:Y6 = Y5
1120 Y7 = (Y3 + CY) / 2:Y8 = Y7
1130 XV = (X5 - XI) / 4:YV = (Y4 - Y1) / 8
1140 P = D — 1:IFP = 0 THEN P = 4
1150 XX = X:YY = Y: GOSUB 1600: IF T(P) = 1 THEN 1230
1160 IF T(P) = 0 THEN 1200
1170 IF R <> RR THEN 1190
1180 HPLOT 29,155 to 29,21 TO 27,19: GOTO 1200
1190 HPLOT X4 + XV, Y4 - XV TO XI + XV, Y1 + XV + YV TO
X5 - XV, (Y5 + YV - XV) TO X8 - XV, Y8 + XV
1200 HPLOT XI, Y1 TO X5,Y5: HPLOT X4,Y4 TO X8,Y8
1210 HPLOT X5,Y5 TO X8,Y8: IF R <> RR THEN HPLOT
XI, Y1 TO X4,Y4
1220 GOTO 1270
1230 GOSUB 1800:XX = XE:YY = YE: GOSUB 1600: IF T(D) = 1
THEN 1270
1240 IF T(D) = 0 THEN 1260
1241 IF R <> RR THEN 1250
1242 HPLOT 29,143 TO 29,31 TO 27,31
1243 GOTO 1260
1250 HPLOT X5 - XV, Y8 TO X5 - XV, Y5 + XV TO X1,Y5 + XV
1260 HPLOT XI, Y5 TO X8,Y5 TO X8,Y8 TO XI, Y8
1270 P = D + 1:IFP = 5 THEN P = 1
1280 XX = X:YY = Y: GOSUB 1600: IF T(P) = 1 THEN 1360
1290 IF T(P) = 0 THEN 1330
1300 IF R <> RR THEN 1320
1310 HPLOT 181,155 TO 181,21 TO 183,19: GOTO 1330
1320 HPLOT X3 - XV, Y3 - XV TO X2 - XV, Y2 + XV + YV TO
X6 + XV, Y5 + YV - XV TO X7 + XV, Y 7 + XV
1330 HPLOT X2,Y2 TO X6,Y6: HPLOT X3,Y3 TO X7,Y7
to page 26
Survive the perils of the China Seas
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• evade government officials who seize illegal cargo and
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• Requires AIVLESOFf
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Building Overwhelming Software
14
S O F T L I N E
Part 2: Random Composition
and Musical Indirection
Music plays an important role in our lives. We encounter it at
work and at play, traveling down the road — even the telephone
hold button plays us music. It should come as no surprise, then, that
when presented with a computer equipped with sound generators,
the first question most people ask is, "Can it play music?"
Notes on the Atari. Creating musical notes with the Atari is pret-
ty easy. A table of pitch values for the notes is provided in the Atari
Basic manual and in the Technical User's Notes. To play middle C,
we look it up in the table and find the value 121. Placing this in the
audio frequency register of a given channel will produce a middle
C, provided we're using the "pure tone" distortion parameter, 10.
(Why this won't work with other tones is beyond the scope of this
discussion; we'll deal with it at a later date.) If you're in Basic, the
command:
SOUND 0,121,10,8
will do the job.
Playing chords is a simple matter of looking up each note in the
chord and plugging the corresponding value into a different sound
channel. With four channels, you can form many complex chords
(Cm9, F#maj7, and so on) or stick to a melody line with simpler voic-
ings. To give the music rhythmic structure, preprogrammed music
can be stored in a data table with duration values; the program, in
turn, uses the duration value as a counter in a delay loop before
playing the next note.
Random Composition. Producing random music is a little hard-
er. There is a wealth of pitch values that don't fit into the equally
tempered scale; in fact, if we just load random data into the fre-
quency registers, the chances are roughly seven out of eight that
we'll get one of these in-between pitches. The resulting noise will
drive any person mad in the space of a few minutes. The problem is
compounded by the absence of any obvious correlation between
the musical intervals and their numerical equivalents. A half step at
the bottom of the Atari's range is thirteen; a half step at the top is
two. No workable formula is going to translate from musical inter-
vals to pitch values.
The obvious solution is to store only "correct" values into a ta-
ble and then randomly select a pointer to retrieve one of those
values. This works, but as a stand-alone composer it has all the mu-
sical validity of a gorilla bashing away at a Wurlitzer. The notes are
equally tempered, yes, but only the most avant-garde would call it
music. Music distinguishes itself from random noise by having a for-
mat, something for the mind to catch and interpret. Music written
within a format becomes a mix of expectation and surprise, and the
craft of the composer lies in the creative way these two elements are
combined.
A common format found in music is that of "key." Though there
are twelve notes between octaves, many combinations of these
notes will be nonsonorous, or harsh, to the ear. Nonsonorities can
be used effectively, but care must be taken to use them skillfully,
much like a good cook uses his hottest spices: sparingly, and always
with a reason. By limiting the possibilities of note combinations be-
fore us, scales help us organize the tones into more sonorous se-
quences, and thereby increase our control over what nonsonorities
we choose to include.
One of the most used scales in Western music is the major scale.
It follows the pattern (given in terms of "steps"; for example, C to
C# is a half step, C to D is a whole step):
1 , 1 , 1 / 2 , 1 , 1 , 1 , 1/2
Note that the pattern is not symmetrical, which will give the ran-
dom composer fits in much the same way the nonpredictable pitch
values did. The situation becomes really muddled if we want the
composer to do something sexy like switch keys or correctly form
and resolve common chords within the scale. Some sort of software
device is needed to keep all these numbers organized.
Indirection. Atari owners should be familiar with the concept of
indirection; the color registers are a method of indirectly specifying
color. Rather than plotting the number of a color, the Atari plots the
name of a color register that specifies the color. For example, put-
ting a two into the screen display area does not mean display color
2, it means display whatever color is in color register 2. If color regis-
ter 2 contains fifteen, then color 15 will be displayed. This is an ex-
tremely powerful graphics tool, for large amounts of previously
plotted points can change color instantly with the movement of a
single byte.
Indirection is an important concept because it lets us operate on
data in terms of categories. We manipulate classes of data grouped
together by their similarities, and in so doing we ignore the trivial in-
dividual characteristics found inside a class. To return to the color
register example, we operate on data in terms of their similarity —
they are all specified by register 2— and ignore their individual char-
acteristics, the X and Y coordinates of each point.
What does this have to do with random music composition? In-
direction, by letting us operate on similarity, allows us to concen-
trate on function. The notes in a scale, the chords formed in the se-
ries, all have specific functions depending on their position in the
key. If the random composer is to resolve tones correctly, it must
recognize and manipulate notes according to their functions in the
scale.
For example, a crucial tone in the scale is the leading tone, the
last note in the scale. The leading tone has a strong compulsion to
lead into the note above it, the tonic (the first note in the scale).
When we follow the leading tone with the tonic, we say we have re-
solved the tone: we have provided it with a satisfactory conclusion.
In the key of C, the leading tone is B, which means it will have a
strong compulsion to resolve to C. In the key of E, however, B is not
the leading tone: it is the fifth tone in the E major scale, not the sev-
enth, and has no compulsion to move at all. We have, then, two en-
tirely different functions for the same note, depending on its rela-
tionship to the key.
If a random composer is going to produce music with any intel-
ligence, it must recognize the note not according to pitch, which is
actually a trivial characteristic, but according to its function in the
key. This means we have to deal indirectly with the note; specify it
according to its relationship, and let some other software mecha-
nism take care of the trivial pitch specifications.
Pitching Tonic. In our sample program, notes are specified by
their relationship to the current key. This number will run from zero
to six, with seven being the tonic an octave higher. The number is
then converted into an offset by reading data from the table at
1100-1107. These data statements convert the sequential note spec-
ifications into the correct interval pattern for a major scale.
Before playing a note, the program adds the offset thus ob-
tained to tonic , which specifies the key. This number is the real
number of the note to be played, and is converted to a pitch value
15
SEPTEMBER 1982
ecs
EAST COAST SOFTWARE
Apple
Software
STOCK
NUMBER
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Simulator
SS103 Apple Panic
55106 Beer Run
55107 Bug Attack
SSI 08 Castle
Wolfenstein
SS109 Copts and
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SSI 14 Cranston Manor
SSI 18 DB Master
SSI 22 Epoch
SS125 Falcons
SSI 26 Firebird
SSI 29 Gorgon
SS132 Graphics Package
55136 Home Accountant
55137 Home Money
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55138 Magic Window
SS141 Olympic
Decathalon
SSI 44 PFS
(Personal Filing System)
SSI 46 Pool 1.5
55148 Raster Blaster
551 49 Robot War
55184 Saturn Navigator
551 52 Snack Attack
55153 Sneakers
SSI 72 Typing Tutor II
SSI 75 Visicalc 3.3
(Special Sale)
SSI 76 Visidex
SSI 77 Visifile
55178 Visiterm
55 1 79 . . . . Visitrend / Visiplot
SS181 Wizardry
551 85 Zork II
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by reading the array pitch , then output to the sound generators. All
this footwork enables us to specify notes in any key with the num-
bers zero through six. In our leading tone example, we would test
for tone 6; if true, the note would be resolved to a 7, or alternative-
ly, 0 (the same note an octave lower). This decision is made ir-
respective of the key being played.
The same idea is applied to the chordal accompaniment. Chords
are specified by their roots' relationship to the key, and the follow-
ing chord is dictated by the rules of resolution set up in the pro-
gram. For instance, whenever a IV chord is played, there is a 50 per-
cent chance that the key will be changed (lines 1490 through 1510).
The new key selected will always be a fifth below the chord (line
1510; we add ten chromatic steps).
The Listing. Initialization is located at the end of the program, at
lines 1400 through 2020. This was done to speed up execution of the
main program loop at lines 100 through 890.
The pitch translation table is read into array pitch at line 1420.
This line is skipped when initialization is reentered.
Lines 1450 through 1540 write a chord pattern for the piece
based on the function of the chord in the previous measure. Add
your own rules for resolving chords here.
Lines 1550 through 1590 create an eight-note pattern that is used
to give structure to the melody. Lines 1600 through 2020 set up the
graphics routine. This routine draws a line from a moving point to a
stationary centerpoint in the upper left quarter of the screen, and
then mirrors the pattern into the remaining quarters of the screen
using the popular kaleidoscope algorithm. No claims to original-
ity are made here, but the pattern produced is pleasing and is a
good demonstration of the Atari's ability to maintain graphics and
sound at the same time.
Lines 110 through 160 play the chord pattern. Note that the first
three entries of the data table at 1100 through 1107 are borrowed to
get the offsets from the root necessary to form the chord (the root, a
third above, and a fifth above). This double use of the table occurs
because the numbers are coincidentally the same.
Lines 170 through 380 play the melody. This melody, unlike the
chord pattern, is not figured out ahead of time. Rules for tone reso-
lution are in lines 190 through 340. If the rules don't apply, a ran-
dom note is selected from the scale, with a 50 percent probability of
actually being a note in the chord (line 300).
Lines 400 through 480 take care of moving the graphics points
and drawing lines. Because this routine's execution time is a func-
tion of the length of the lines being drawn, it also is an interesting
tempo control for the music: when the display gets busier, the mu-
sic plays faster.
When thirty-two bars have been played, the screen is cleared, a
new chord pattern is written, and the program repeats. While the
chord pattern is being written, line 1450 plays the scale of the last
key played to keep the transition smooth.
This program is really a jumping-off point for playing with music
theory. The rules defined are the bare minimum necessary to make
sonorous music. The more rules you add, the more intelligently the
program will compose, and the less random the results will seem.
More importantly, creative effort in the definition of a music system
will pay off in an increased understanding of music, texture, and
style.
In the next article, we'll take a look at the internal details of
Atari's sound generators and find out why the pitch tables only work
with distortion parameter 10.
10 REM ********************************************
20 REM * AN AUDIO-VISUAL MEDITATION *
30 REM * by Bill Williams *
40 REM ********************************************
50 DIM PITCH(36),PATTRN(31),TONIC(31),MOTIF(7)
60 FETCH =800
70 REM CALL INITIALIZATION
80 GOSUB 1420
90 REM **MAIN PROGRAM LOOP**
16
S O F T L I N E
100 FOR BAR=0 TO 31
110 REM UPDATE CHORD
120 FOR VOICE=0 TO 2
130 RESTORE 1100+VOICE:READ OFFST
140 OFFST= OFFST+PATTRN(BAR)
150 GOSUB FETCH :SOUND
VOICE,PITCH(TONIC(BAR)+FOUND),10,4
160 NEXT VOICE
170 REM NOW FOR THE MELODY
180 FOR BEAT=0 TO 3
190 IF MELODYoll THEN 220
200 IF RND(0)<0.7 THEN MELODY=12:GOTO 370
210 MELODY=0:GOTO 370
220 REM PLAY MOTIF?
230 IF THEMEF=0 OR RND(0)<0.1 THEN 270
240 THEMEP=THEMEP+1:IF THEMEP > 7 THEN
THEMEP=0:THEMEF=0
250 OFFST=PATTRN(BAR)+MOTIF(THEMEP)
260 GOSUB FETCH :MELODY= FOUND :GOTO 370
270 REM START MOTIF?
280 IF RND(0)< 0.15 THEN THEMEF=1
290 IF MELODY=5 THEN MELODY=4:GOTO 370
300 IF RND(0)<0.5 THEN 350
310 REM PICK NOTE IN CHORD
320 RESTORE 1100+INT(RND(0)*3)
330 READ OFFST:OFFST=OFFST+ PATTRN (BAR)
340 GOSUB FETCH :MELODY=FOUND:GOTO 370
350 REM ANY RANDOM NOTE
360 RESTORE 1100+INT(RND(0)*6):READ MELODY
370 REM "PLAY MELODY**
380 SOUND 3,PITCH(TONIC(BAR)+MELODY+12),10,6
390 REM ** GRAPHICS ROUTINE **
400 X=X + DX:IF X<0 THEN X=0:DX=-DX
410 IF X>159 THEN X=159:DX = -DX
420 Y=Y+DY:IF Y<0 THEN Y=95
430 IF Y>95 THEN Y=0
440 PLOT CX,CY:DRAWTO X,Y
450 PLOT 319— CX ( CY:DRAWTO 319-X,Y
460 PLOT CX,191 - CY : DR AWTO X,1 91 - Y
470 PLOT 319- CX,191 — C Y : DRAWTO 319-X/I91-Y
480 IF RND(0)<0.1 THEN
CX= INT(RND(0) *160):CY=INT(RND(0)*%)
490 NEXT BEAT: NEXT BAR
500 GOSUB 1440:GOTO 100
800 REM FETCH SUBROUTINE
810 IF OFFST>6 THEN OFFST=OFFST-7
820 RESTORE 1100+OFFST:READ FOUND
830 RETURN
1000 REM PITCH VALUE TABLE
1010 DATA 243, 230,217,204,193,182,173,162,153,144,136,128,
1 21 ,1 1 4,1 08,1 02,%, 91 ,85,81 ,76,72
1020 DATA 68,64,60,57,53,50,47,45,42,40,37,35,33,31,29
1100 DATA 0
1101 DATA 2
1102 DATA 4
1103 DATA 5
1104 DATA 7
1105 DATA 9
1106 DATA 11
1107 DATA 12
1400 REM ** INITIALIZATION **
1410 REM 1420 IS "COLDSTART"
1420 TONIC(31)=0:PATTRN(0)=0:FOR L=0 TO 36: READ
A:PITCH(L)=A:NEXT L
1430 REM 1440 IS "WARMSTART"
1440 TONIC(0)=TONIC(31)
1450 FOR BAR=1 TO 31:RESTORE 1100+INT(BAR/4):READ
A:SOUND 3,PITCH(A+TONIC(0)),10,4
1460 TONIC(BAR)=TONIC(BAR— 1)
1470 IF PATTRN(BAR-1)=6 THEN PATTRN(BAR)=0:GOTO
1520
1480 IF PATTRN(BAR-1)=1 AND RND(0)<0.8 THEN
PATTRN(BAR)=4:GOTO 1520
1490 IF PATTRN(BAR— 1}< >3 OR RND(0)<0.5 THEN
PATTRN (B AR) = I NT (RN D(0) *7) :GOT O 1520
1500 REM CHANGE KEY
1510 PATTRN (BAR) = 0:TONIC(BAR)=TONIC(BAR)+10: IF
TONIC(BAR)>l1 THEN TONIC(BAR)=TONIC(BAR)-12
1520 SOUND 3,PITCH(TONIC(0)+12),10,4
1530 IF PATTRN(BAR)>6 THEN
PATTRN(BAR)=PATTRN(BAR)-7
1540 NEXT BAR
1550 REM SET UP MOTIF
1560 FOR L=0 TO 7
1570 IF RND(0)<0.7 THEN RESTORE
1100+INT(RND(0)*3):READ
OFFST:MOTIF(L) = OFFST:GOTO 1590
1580 MOTIF(L) = INT(RND(0)*7)
1590 NEXT L
1600 REM **SET UP GRAPHICS**
1610 GRAPHICS 24:COLOR 1
1620 IF RND(0)<0.5 THEN 1640
1630 SETCOLOR 2,RND(0)*16,0:SETCOLOR
1,0,RND(0)*8+4:GOTO 1650
1640 SETCOLOR 2,RND(0)*16,RND(0)*6+4:SETCOLOR 1,0,0
1650 CX= INT(RND(0)*160) :X= INT(RND(0)*160)
1660 CY = INT(RND(0)*%): Y=INT(RND(0) *%)
1670 GOSUB 2000:DX=VEC
1680 GOSUB 2000:DY=VEC
1690 RETURN
2000 VEC=INT(RND(0)*4)+1
2010 IF RND(0)<0.5 THEN VEC=-VEC
2020 RETURN
WIZMAKER
WIZARDRY* CHARACTER
EDITOR
By RON RICHARDS
• Resurrect the dead.
• Recover lost warriors. ^ ((
• Modify attributes, race & age.
• Change experience and hit points.
• Learn more spells & earn gold.
• CHEAT! Make a 10,000 level Super
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^ ^ * * nc l uc ^ es m aps of dungeon
• Requires 48K & Applesoft.
$ 20.00
ARS PUBLICATIONS
3710 Pacific Ave. #J6
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TM of Sir Tech
SEPTEMBE R 1982
17
by ANDREW CHRISTIE
/ had read a good many detective novels, as I found they
were excellent to take one's mind off one's worries. After
discussing one with my sister, she said it was almost im-
possible to find a good detective story, where you didn't
know who committed the crime. I said I thought I could
write one.
—Agatha Christie
It's three a.m. in the city; decent folks are home in bed. The
wind is still blowing in from the desert, hot and dry and steady, fray-
ing nerves to a razor's edge; fingers twitch and eyes glance furtively
at shadows or jerk toward the sound of a match being struck and
catch the sight of a cigarette end glowing in a doorway.
Two stories up, there's a light in a window. A mainframe pro-
grammer is hunched over his terminal, long after hours, stealthily
punching up hit points, strength, wisdom, charisma, and agility, and
cackling over his readouts. It's all luck; random chance. He doesn't
know it. It doesn't mean a thing. Poor sap.
Meanwhile, across town, wandering kids are checking out the
Pong game at the Burger Chef, or sneaking into the college recrea-
tion center to play Asteroids.
That's how it was. It wasn't much. Origins are always crude. Be-
tween games that only a programmer could love and games that
had only a slight edge over the spin cycle at Laundry King, there was
little to indicate future greatness. But in prehistoric Britain, there was
little to indicate Shakespeare.
The health of an art form depends upon diversity. Diversity
comes with complexity. Complexity comes with culture. If you're
gonna play games with a computer, sooner or later you gotta go to
the culture. Otherwise, you wind up as cold meat on a slab, be-
cause nobody can play the game forever.
It's that kind of business.
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night Here's the picture. Sometime
around 700 A.D., a teller of tales decided to recount the saga of a
mighty hero with a fast broadsword who performed great deeds and
saved a village by slaying a monster and its mother.
Not thirteen hundred years after Beowulf, someone got the idea
for a new kind of open-ended, role-playing game involving dun-
geons and dragons. And in a much shorter span of time, someone
else put it into a computer.
Thus did the adventure make its way through the cultural ma-
trix. The current focus of our concern did not take half so long.
Sometime around April 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, casting about for
some leisurely occupation "to keep from going mad," something to
do in between the penning of his "serious" stories, hit upon a new
idea; a genre composed of "tales of ratiocination." (He had already
invented the short story sometime previously, making his task that
much easier.) The first, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," presented a
brilliant detective, a slightly dim but willing detective's assistant, a
very dim officer of the law, a lot of false clues, and a climactic reve-
lation of the solution to the mystery, provided by the brilliant de-
tective in a room with all the suspects present, at the end of the
story.
Everything old was once young.
Poe's new invention didn't really catch on stateside, but en-
joyed a modest vogue across the Atlantic at the hands of Wilkie Col-
lins, Emile Gaboriau, and Charles Dickens.
After the momentous arrival of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, the en-
tire genre tended to coast on the reputation of the best-known
character in English literature until the early 1920s, when Dame
Agatha had her fateful conversation with her sister, and, along with
Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Dashiell Hammett, cre-
ated what is commonly known among aficionados as the golden
age of detective fiction.
At which point, somebody decided it would make a good game.
Suddenly a Shot Rang Out. Mr. Ree was an elegant ancestor of
the perennial Clue (more elegant by far than the current woefully
streamlined version). In modern times, Electronic Detective uses
the traditional elements in the service of a logic game with odd/even
number sequences. Stop Thief brought an extra dimension to
board games with its marvelously subtle auditory clues — doors and
windows opening; footsteps, inside and outside; subways. . . .
But it was the very first games, expensively printed books with
pictures and diagrams, providing a dossier, evidence, and a packet
at the end containing the solution, that were the most perfect hy-
brid of a literary genre that seemed based on games, and games that
seemed based on books.
At least it seemed that way to Marc Blank, who discovered the
Dennis Whitney thirties mystery game novels through a current re-
18
S O F T L I N E
IS AFOOT!
print series from Mayflower Books.
Blank and the folks at Infocom were looking for a follow-up to
Zork; a way to expand on the fantasy game and its relatively unre-
lated sets of puzzle problems. Reading the old game books, he
knew he was on to something, except that at the end, the solution
packet was not able to say, "No, you're wrong; try again"; it simply
gave you the answer. It was not interactive.
"We wanted to come up with something where you have ac-
tion/reaction," Blank recalls, "where you're told the part that you've
missed after you come up with a potential solution, and you can go
back and try again."
What Infocom came up with was the phenomenally popular
Deadline, first in a series of interactive mysteries for the personal
computer. The first forays into computer mystery, however, were
Adventure International's Curse of Crowley Manor and Sierra On-
Line's Mystery House, the latter fondly remembered today for all its
cheerful mayhem and thudding bodies, plus an extensive vocabu-
lary and pioneering graphics. Though these early games are very
firmly in the adventure mold, the computer mystery can be seen to
have descended from them, as the literary detective hero— a think-
ing man of action — descended from the adventure hero.
Crowley Manor does not have much to do with real life, at-
tempting a blend of Edwardian mystery with standard-issue fantasy
demons and wraiths. Mystery House is set in the contemporary
world, an attraction for those among us who simply are not com-
fortable with fantasy. As Blank puts it, "When you open a door, you
don't have to worry about a monster jumping out."
The mystery is indeed different from the adventure. "When you
confront a problem, you have to say 'What am I gonna do now,' not
two hundred moves from now, when you come back to it later. In
Deadline, we wanted to appeal to the nonfantasy people who
would rather be part of a real story; people who always wanted to
participate when they read the books.
"We designed the game to be open-ended and to have a large
vocabulary, but at the same time, we didn't want it too large and
too open."
A detective story on a computer is a different proposition from a
detective story in a book. Blank and company had to map out their
plot twists and build their characters around them. "We couldn't
throw in some amazing coincidence at the end that solves every-
thing and that you could never possibly have guessed. You can't run
all over town looking for clues, and you can't talk to the suspects
about any subject that comes into your head."
Somewhere a Door Slammed. If Deadline, with its twenty-five
thousand words of text and machine-independent language, is the
Cadillac of the fledgling genre of computer detective fiction, there
are currently several attractive economy models to choose from. In-
evitably, they must all be compared to Deadline, as most every-
thing else in this new genre is likely to be for some time to come.
Alibi, from Hayden Book Company's Microcomputer Game-
ware division, offers several levels of play, unlike Deadline, but it's
far more limited and highly structured. Alibi is essentially author Ian
Trackman's variation on the stalwart old one-of-them-always-lies-
and-one-always-tells-the-truth party game. The first discrepancy in
testimony generally gives you your murderer/liar, knowledge you
can then use to ascertain place and time. Getting all three correct
promotes you to the next level — more suspects, more rooms, and a
longer time span. In play, it resembles Electronic Detective, much
simplified. The near-infinite different sets of circumstances pro-
duced by combinations of these variables produces a new "case"
with every playing, very much in the tradition of Clue.
For the younger set, there's the nonviolent Snooper Troops, a
mystery series from Spinnaker Software, the first of which, The
Granite Point Ghost, does, in fact, go all over town. Ostensibly (and
successfully) a piece of educational software, this one is a delightful
surprise. You get to drive around in your Snoopmobile (a '57
Buick, judging by maneuverability and response, but what the hey),
choosing your own suspects from a large cast of characters with sep-
arate identities and personalities. You have several different ways to
obtain clues, and though your interrogatives are limited, they are
never repetitive. The first installment of the Snooper Troops series
proves itself an original, owing nothing to any other game. For its lit-
erary antecedents, its roots are in the classics of juvenile detective
fiction, recalling Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys rather
than Hercule Poirot or Sam Spade.
The Maid Screamed; a Woman Fainted. All of the foregoing will
find their markets among the fans of the type of game each repre-
sents. But for hardcore mystery addicts, the only actual competition
for Deadline may well be Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detec-
tive, released as a bookshelf game last May by Sleuth Publications of
San Francisco and now programmed for the Atari computer by
19
SEPTEMBER 1982
Voyager Software. It's a game that gives new vistas of meaning to the
term open-ended.
Scheduled for a release this fall, the Atari Forth ver-
sion is a scaled-down rendering of Gary Grady's awesomely com-
plex and intricate original game, consisting essentially of scenarios
similar to the Thames Murders from the game case book, and using
some graphics for a map of Holmes's London, circa 1886, with num-
bered clue points. Grady, a scholar of the Holmes canon, took two
years to write the game, and embarked on the project with the idea
of creating something "more complex than the board games. A
game like 227 B Baker Street doesn't give a player a choice; you
have no control over the clue you're going to get and there's no re-
lationship of the clues to the process of play. We wanted the idea of
solving a mystery rather than a puzzle."
For Grady, the difference between a logic game and a mystery is
that a mystery gives you unexplained events from which you must
deduce a larger context; a logic puzzle tells you what happened and
leaves you to infer the specific events that make up that context.
"In real life, if a policeman walks into a room and finds a dead
body, that's all he knows."
Like the original, Voyager's computer translation is planned to
be a multiplayer game, with players donning the roles of the Baker
Street Irregulars and competing with Holmes in the streets of Vic-
torian London to find the solution to each case with maximum dis-
patch. In the course of investigating the main case, players are lia-
ble to stumble onto several other unrelated mysteries; part of the
mystery is finding out how many cases you have to solve.
Consulting Detective will be regularly updated with new cases,
all requiring a master disk containing the essential information
for play.
A Cloud Passed over the Moon. How to follow Sherlock Holmes
was a problem before and may prove to be a problem again. (Info-
corn's next mystery game, planned for release in early 1983, will be
an eyewitness murder case in which you may prevent the murder
from occurring or possibly die trying.) It has long been noted that
the most vital and interesting writers of fiction in America during the
last fifty years have been mystery writers; detective novel hacks;
graduates of the pulp thriller, once removed: the Raymond Chand-
lers, Dashiell Hammetts, and Ross MacDonalds.
This new breed of computer game may well bring out the best in
designers and programmers, igniting a comparable renaissance of
the popular imagination.
Marc Blank is convinced:
"In the movie Deathtrap , they show you the body and tell you
it's dead. It turns out not to be. ... In these games, you examine the
body. Unlike books and movies, there's no cheating. The intent is
not to maximize audience surprise, but a player's sense of accom-
plishment."
Or as Gary Grady recalls, "Dorothy Sayers once said that the job
of the mystery writer is to gently take the reader by the hand and
lead him in the wrong direction. We don't do that."
That's the essential difference between computer detection and
the literary mystery, though it all started in the same cradle of pop-
ular culture. One could take that case as far back as 1794 and Ann
Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which, in recounting the trials of
a stalwart English couple who endure an extended stay in an an-
cient Italian castle, bearing up under threats of death, abduction,
the supernatural, and a general air of menace, probably created sev-
eral genres at once. Lots of secret panels and underground cata-
combs, too.
Thus do the old and enduring genetic materials return and re-
turn again, crossing over from one medium to another to lend sev-
eral hundred years of literary tradition to your eager little micro.
And everything old is new again. Si
Beat the clock! Outsmart your friends!
The high-speed dictionary game
At last, an educational game that's really fun to play! You
start each turn with a word, 6 definitions, and a counter
set to 600 points. As time passes the points tick away. The
sooner you pick the correct definition, the more points
you get, butthesooneryou guess wrong, the more points
you lose.
3 levels of play on one disk:
• Beginner (ages 9-14) • Regular • Challenge
2000 words and definitions
$24.95
APPLE: 48K - disk — APPLESOFT ATARI: 32 K - disk — BASIC
Now available on cassette for the ATARI 400/800
Features: Beginner’s and Intermediate WORDRACE
YOU CAN PLAY 3 NEW GAMES
WITH YOUR -VlCucluZC^
DISKETTE: ^
The next disk in the WORDRACE System. Use it
along with your WORDRACE disk to play:
• CLAIM TO FAME (600 famous people in history)
• SPORTS DERBY (600 pieces of sports trivia)
• Plus more vocabulary words
$19.95
Requires WORDRACE disk
Admit it: you've cursed out your computer.
Every programmer does it eventually. E ver wonder how it would reply?
Try ABUSE
The insult program.
• Funny • Unpredictable • Interactive
• Guaranteed to call you something
you've never been called before!
$19.95
ATARI: 40K-
APPLE: 48K -
disk -
disk -
BASIC
APPLESOFT
Available at your computer store or direct from DON’T ASK
Include $2.00 shipping for each program (Calif, residents add 6% tax)
ATARI is a trademark of ATARI INC.
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Gameline
Serpentine
By David Snider.
The beauty of Serpentine is twofold. To begin with, the game is
devilishly addicting, being endowed with the quality that makes ar-
cade games worth the bother. You know that if you hadn't made that
one wrong move you would still be alive, so you find yourself try-
ing again and again. There is a definite carrot-dangling-on-a-stick
quality to this game. The other nice thing about the program is how
well done it is.
Imagine Chinese dragons squaring off in the midst of a pa-
rade — tails whipping around corners, tight circular chases with sin-
uous ninety-degree turns, and some beautifully exasperating flim-
flam as rival serpents cross paths and come out heads at each end.
Serpentine is a fresh twist in maze games. You chase snakes' tails
and they chase yours. It stars two teams of three snakes each: your
team is blue and theirs is orange. An interesting aspect of the com-
petition is that both sides are at root identically matched. Only fate
(and the author, who also wrote Midnight Magic) has made your
team the good guys.
Of course, it would only be a wrestling match if both sides
weren't given handicaps. Orange serpents turn green when you're
longer than they are, and then you can eat them whole, head on.
Your team only comes out of the starting gate one snake at a time.
The enemy snakes come out in threes, and they're seven sections
long; you're only three sections long to start.
As the enemy serpents first slink through the maze, you should
be hunting frogs. Eat a frog that hops into the game and you grow
one section. Chomping off the enemy's tail whittles him down to
size but you don't grow. Better to leave him at least two sections
long so you can eat him head on; then you score more and also gain
a length.
Both teams of snakes lay eggs. Theirs are speckled and grow into
more pesky snakes if not eaten by you. Yours are blue, and when
they hatch at the end of each round (if they haven't been eaten),
they inch cutely to home base and go with you to the next of an in-
credible ninety-nine levels (actually twenty different mazes that re-
peat; enemy snakes get smarter as you climb).
With blue and yellow teams in combat, this game only plays well
on a color monitor. It can be played in black and white as long as
you keep an eye on your hero and everyone's lengths. You'll have
to determine when the enemy is head-on edible by knowing when
it's shorter than you are.
A maze game played on a joystick can be a slippery chore. Ser-
pentine responds crisply to joystick as well as keyboard. It's good,
clean fun and it'll make you reckless. Heavy objects lying near the
computer should be removed to lessen the temptation to halt the
inexorable march of the slinky green bandits.
Between the frogs, the speckled eggs, and the serpents' heads,
you can score a bellyful of points if you're clever. You can also get
your little tail nipped off quite often if you're not. So stay hungry,
pray the frogs are running, and keep your hind end out of trouble.
Choplifter was a hard act to follow. Serpentine is not quite the
graphics tour de force that its whirlybird predecessor was, but it's
twice the game. And that's no mean feat. lil/itfJ
Apple II, Apple II Plus; 48K. $34.95 from Broderbund Software, 1938 Fourth
Street, San Rafael, CA 94901; (415) 456-6424.
Canyon Climber
By Tim Ferris.
Danger lurks as you begin your journey from the bottom of the
Colorado River up the walls of the Grand Canyon in Canyon
Climber. In your quest to reach the top of the canyon, you must
overcome crazy mountain goats, Indian archers, and eagle-eyed
birds who drop bricks. Good athletic skills and plenty of luck are the
two keys to success in this challenging one-player Atari game.
As you start your dangerous ascent, your first task is to lay explo-
sives across four towering bridges. It might sound easy, but there are
these big-horned mountain goats that patrol the bridges in pairs.
When the confrontation between man and animal occurs, your only
defense is to attempt to hurdle the tops of the goats' sharp horns. If
your timing isn't perfect, the goat will send you tumbling down to
the pits of the river. Once all the charges are set, you can gleefully
push the plunger and everything goes!
On the next level, mighty Indian warriors constantly bombard
you with arrows. You have the option of jumping the arrows or
grabbing a shield to block them. If you choose the athletic option,
you must jump with great precision or be knocked off the edge of
the cliff. Although the shields provide good protection, they can dis-
appear at any time between three and twelve seconds. It is quite
easy to be struck right between the eyes as the shield vanishes with
no warning.
Should you survive the Indians, you reach the gorges and can
see the spacious blue sky at the top of the canyon. But the sky is full
of birds who are dropping bricks with excellent aim! With no rest or
protection, you must jump the peaks and valleys while dodging the
bricks. Mistiming a jump or getting hit with a brick will send you—
yup, off the cliff again. If you can get to the top of the canyon you
begin dancing with joy. To your dismay, a billy goat knocks you all
the way to the bottom of the Colorado River to begin once more —
having been rewarded for your expert mountain-climbing ability
with an extra climber.
On all the levels are ladders to climb, which provide occasional
protection from the goats and arrows. Don't get caught on the lad-
ders in the gorges or the falling bricks will get you. The longer it
takes to complete the three levels, the faster the obstacles come at
you, so be quick and sure-footed. With each successful journey up
the canyon the natives become even more protective of their
peaceful environment. Canyon Climber fits right in with the "climb-
ing craze" sweeping the arcades today. Although the graphics are
not as good as some of their other games, Datasoft has given us a
game that is fun to play and makes good use of the computer's ani-
mation and musical capabilities.
Atari 400 or 800; 16K; disk or cassette. $29.95 from Datasoft, 19519 Business
Center Drive, Northridge, CA 91324; (213) 701-5161.
22
S O F T L I N E
Galaxy of Games
By John Savolaine, Don Dilley, and Jerry and Lori Wilkerson.
For those who want to leave the world of adventuring, target
shooting, and dot-gobbling games, Galaxy of Games offers a pot-
pourri of four games to relax with. There are no time limits, no high
scores to beat, nothing to kill— although you wouldn't know it from
the names: Hangman, One-Armed Bandit, Skunk, and Jacks.
Hangman is the traditional game in which the player tries to
guess a word the computer has chosen by filling in letters. If you
guess right, the appropriate blanks are filled in. Each wrong guess
adds a part to the body being hung. If the body is complete, you
lose. In this version of Hangman, the computer shows the words
and letters that have been tried.
One-Armed Bandit simulates a slot machine; the object is to win
money. The computer shows the results of the last spin and the play-
er's cash. Each turn, you bet between one and a hundred dollars. If
you lose all your money, you can play on the computer's credit.
The game is slow, but the flashing lights and handle movement
that slow it down do add realism.
Skunk is a challenging dice game either solo or with as many as
six players. The computer rolls six dice. You must try to score as
many points as possible based on the value of the dice and their pat-
terns (three of a kind, three pairs, six ones, and so on). Dice with
point value may be saved and their points added to your score; then
you continue to roll any remaining dice or another six. Your turn
ends either when you choose to end it or when you're skunked. If
you're skunked, you lose all the points you scored that turn.
Skunk makes the sound of rolling dice and even plays tunes.
One to five people may play Jacks, a card game in which the ob-
ject is to get the least amount of points. Jacks are valuable because
they count no points; all other cards count their face value or ten.
This program contains a bug, but it's triggered only by human er-
ror: if you try to take a card from the discard pile when there are no
cards there, the program kicks out. Still, Jacks is an exciting game.
These games are excellent in detail and playability. Each game in
Galaxy of Games is challenging in its way. The games are especially
good for youngsters because the instructions are easy to under-
stand. At four games for the price of one, this is a real bargain. SQ
TRS-80 models I and III; 16K; cassette or disk. $14.95 from Hayden Micro-
computer Gameware, 50 Essex Street, Rochelle Park, NJ 07662; (800) 631-0856.
Marauder
By Rorke Weigandt and Eric Hammond.
This one's for the plunder and pillage crowd. The idea is simple:
Run around the galaxy trashing planets. Barring any philosophical
qualms one may have about extinguishing alien fauna, destroying
planets can be fun. Besides, the guards are all robots and mean.
Marauder is a two-part space seek-and-destroy game in which
you are the marauder, first controlling a spacecraft blasting away at
planetary defenses and then running about in undergound tunnels
trying to destroy the planet's main power supply. While there is no
real strategy or thought involved in the game, it can be a lot of fun.
Players can choose to play the first part or second part exclusively or
the full game.
The first part of the game puts you in control of a ship hovering
above the surface of a nameless planet. You must destroy all of the
defenses by shooting through a force field and then bombing mis-
sile launch sites. The ground installations fire slow-moving heat-
seeking mines that follow you, missiles that detonate at the point
where they expected you to be, laser beams that rise perpendicular
to the planet's surface, and indestructible fireballs that home in on
you but also constantly rise, so that a bit of skillful maneuvering will
get you below them and out of harm's way. Your ship is equipped
with a temporary overdrive for those breathless moments when a
fireball seems to have your number.
Once you have wiped the surface of the planet clean, you must
dive through the wreckage of the fireball launcher to enter the un-
THE FUTURE IN GAMEWARE IS HERE NOW!
Hex THE PORT AUTHORITY
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TRADITIONAL APPLE GAMEWARE IS
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Dealer inquiries invited.
lOulPure
P.O. BOX 519
PLYMOUTH, Ml 48170
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MICHIGAN RESIDENTS ADD 4% SALES TAX.
PLEASE SEND ME PO
AUTHORITY AT $34.95 EACH, PLUS |
$2.00 SHIPPING AND HANDLING.
EXPIRATION DATE .
SIGNATURE
SEPTEMBER 1982
23
derground maze. The maze is a relatively simple one populated by a
particularly bellicose species of robot. You can't see the vicious
droids until they are in line of sight, and vice versa.
Your mission, once in the maze, is to locate the power source
and destroy it with your hand weapon. Once you have blown up
the power source, you have just time to get back to your ship be-
fore the roof begins to cave in.
One peculiarity of the game is that, while your marauder carries
his weapon in his right hand, the robots have center-mounted blast-
ers; face-to-face confrontations are invariably fatal to you, so you
must be extraordinarily careful not to square off with a robot.
All in all, Marauder is as good as any mindless arcade game, and
better than most. Its strength and weakness are one and the same:
to succeed one needs good reflexes only; there are no strategies to
be developed, no intelligent opposition to outfox. If you are look-
ing for entertainment without mental calisthenics, this game should
provide hours and hours of fun. GD
Apple II, Apple II Plus; 48K; disk. $34.95 from Sierra On-Line, 36575 Mudge
Ranch Road, Coarsegold, CA 93614; (209) 683-6858.
Hockey
Solitaire computer games, dependent on the interaction be-
tween player and machine, require a certain level of sophistication
to remain interesting. Those needing at least two human players, on
the other hand, provide much of their enjoyment because of the
head-to-head combat between competitive rivals. Since the com-
puter acts only as the medium on which the challenge is met, the
game itself need not be intricate to be successful.
Such is the case with Gamma Software's Hockey, a simple game
with great potential for enjoyment.
This is standard ice hockey, although the teams are reduced to
four players each: three forwards and a goalie. A standard joystick
controls one of the forwards, either the man with the puck or his
opposing guard. The other two men on each side are monitored by
the computer and manage to follow the flow of action fairly well.
Should the puck be passed, the passer becomes computer-con-
trolled and the passee then responds to the joystick.
The goalie, who guards the front of the cage, cannot hold the
puck but deflects it back onto the playfield. It then can be picked up
when a forward touches it with his stick. By the same token, the
puck may be stolen by a defensive man who touches it with his stick.
The game begins with a face-off at the center of the rink, a ma-
neuver that's repeated following each goal (worth one point).
Should the game end in a tie, the computer immediately moves into
a two-minute sudden death playoff. The game length itself can be
optioned at three, five, or eight minutes.
Up to four players can participate. Partners (each with a joystick)
divide team responsibilities: one controls the forwards, while the
other acts as goalie. This option actually is preferable, since it is dif-
ficult to guard one's goal and try to reclaim the puck when a single
joystick controls all four men.
The simple graphics, in which a skater resembles a praying man-
tis, are enough to differentiate man from stick. The sound effects are
more primitive: the crowd's cheers sound more like pounding surf,
and the match ends with only a brief blaaat from the buzzer. Far
better is the game's beginning, when the computer plays the last
few bars of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (without, fortunately, an at-
tempt to reproduce Ethel Merman's vocal).
On the negative side, it is very difficult for the defender to spot
his flashing man (which should be guarding the puck) amid the fre-
netic activity of a goal rush. The hint in the instruction manual (re-
lax the joystick to the center position and look closely) is of limited
use; a goal can be scored in the meantime. It's also unfortunate that
the game does not allow forwards to skate behind the goal, as that
maneuver produces intriguing shots. Finally, there is no running
game score and no halves or quarters; the game starts from scratch
at the end of each match.
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_____ _ ®
A
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Adventures 1-12
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Kayos (d)
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PHOT (c) (Home Package)
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24
S O F T L I N E
In spite of those shortcomings, Hockey has an infectious streak
to it, and it's nice to see a game that can involve so many people.
Hockey may look primitive, but that's appropriate for a game that
caters to an instinct as primitive as competitive drive. 03
Atari 400 or 800; 16K; disk. $29.95 from Gamma Software, Box 25625, Los An-
geles, CA 90025; (213) 473-7441.
Hazard Run
By Dennis Zander.
What hath Burt Reynolds wrought?
Most of the world probably has had it with good ol' boys and
slack-jawed law enforcement officers. Today's software industry,
however, is not apt to leave a generic stone unturned. Those thrilled
by converted Mustangs leaping large bodies of water now have the
opportunity to duplicate that feat of derring-do with their home
computers.
Hazard Run , unfortunately, is not up to its film forerunners.
Zander's program is rather small (144 sectors of Basic) and has a high
frustration quotient, which might result in players hurling joysticks
through their monitors.
This solitaire game employs only three joystick commands: left,
right, and fire. After starting the run, the firing button becomes the
brake, and the stick commands correspond to the image on the
screen. Your car will always accelerate unless the brake is applied.
The car remains at the base of the screen while the "course" scrolls
downward. Vehicle-crunching hazards include tree trunks, rocks,
fences, police cars, canyon walls, bridge struts, and some chickens
(fryers, no doubt). Hitting such an object dead on will flip and
destroy one of your five cars; sideswiping will tip the car onto two
wheels, making it narrower and able to squeeze through tight spots.
Hazard Run's major problem is the manner in which the joy-
stick steers the car. Rather than simulating the smooth turning ac-
tion of front-wheel or rear-wheel drive, the car pivots at its center
and then back to vertical. This pendular action makes the car a
wider target while negotiating a turn, increasing the chances of hit-
ting the object you're trying to avoid.
Almost worse is the lack of anticipation time. Jumping a river
must be done at no less than sixty miles per hour (something you
won't learn from the sparse instructions; just remember, you read it
here first) or the car will crash into the far embankment, ending that
particular run. Also, the car will not reach sixty from a standing start
in the space provided by one screen's worth of graphics. In other
words, there is not sufficient time to negotiate several of the rivers.
The game must be partially memorized before it can be completed
successfully.
While there are four different runs, ranging from "chicken run"
(the shortest and easiest) to "Hell's canyon" (the longest and hard-
est), each merely builds on those preceding it. Extra gas will be
needed for the longer trips, and fuel may be picked up by running
over hazardously placed gas cans.
When jumping a river , point of view switches from bird's-eye to
sidelong. If the car makes the jump, action immediately returns to
the aerial view, so be prepared to move quickly. The program plays
the same few bars from "Dixie" regardless of the jump's outcome; it
would be nicer (and preferable psychologically) to hear something
different as a reward for making the jump.
Clearing the final river results in the anticlimactic delight of
watching the pursuing police car land in the drink. It's a cute touch,
but one that rapidly wears thin ... as does the wait required before
each run while the two drivers enter the car.
Hazard Run is just a bit too primitive for today's market and
will be of interest mostly to neophytes and young children. HE
Atari 400 or 800; 16K. Cassette, $27.95; disk, $31.95 from Artworx, 150 North
Main Street, Fairport, NY 14450; (800) 828-6573; in New York, (716) 425-2833.
Guest reviewers in September were Dave Albert, Derrick Bang,
Mike Klem, and Marcia and Gary Rose. gg
S E P T E M B
c
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(retail 34.95)
OR
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OR
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(retail 29.95)
with any other purchase
Of course we re just as proud of our regular prices.
And if you don’t see what you want here, please call us
and ask for it, or write for our free catalog.
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Wizardry 49.95 39.95 Microsoft Softcard ... 395.00 315.95
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FREE CATALOG
E R 19 8 2
25
Subscribe Today Take a break
from the space wars and shoot ’em
ups. The Dirty Book will bring you
the latest collection of bedroom
programs and games geared to
creative, joyful living and
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^opportunity to chart your
own course to greater
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Read how your fellow computerists
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Maze in 3-D
from page 14
1340 HPLOT X6,Y6 TO X7,Y7: IF R <> RR THEN HPLOT
X2,Y2 TO X3 ; Y3
1350 GOTO 1400
1360 GOSUB 1800:XX = XE:YY = YE: GOSUB 1600: IF T(D) = 1
THEN 1400
1370 IF T(D) = 0 THEN 1390
1371 IF R <> RR THEN 1380
1372 HPLOT 181,143 TO 181,31 TO 183,31
1373 GOTO 1390
1380 HPLOT X6 + XV, Y 7 TO X6 + XV, Y6 + XV TO X2,Y6 + XV
1390 HPLOT X2,Y6 TO X7,Y6 TO X7,Y7 TO X3,Y7
1400 XI = X5:Y1 = Y5:X2 = X6:Y2 = Y6
1410 X3 = X7:Y3 = Y7:X4 = X8:Y4 = Y8
1420 XX = X:YY = Y: GOSUB 1600:N = T(D)
1430 IF N <> 1 THEN 1500
1440 IF D = 1 THEN Y = Y - 1
1450 IF D = 2 THEN X = X + 1
1460 IF D = 3 THEN Y = Y + 1
1470 IF D = 4 THEN X = X - 1
1480 R = R-1:IFR = 0 THEN 1540
1490 GOTO 1090
1500 HPLOT X5,Y5 TO X6,Y6 TO X7,Y7 TO X8,Y8 TO X5,Y5
1510 IF N <> 2 THEN 1540
1520 XV = (X2 - XI) / 8:YV = (Y4 - Y1) / 8
1530 HPLOT X8 + XV, Y8 TO X5 + XV, Y5 + YV TO X6 - XV, Y6
+ YV TO X7 - XV, Y7
1540 RETURN
1600 T = A%(XX,YY)
1610 IF T < 0 THEN T = T + 65536
1620 S = INT (T / 40%)
1630 T = T - S * 4096
1640 T(1) = INT (T / 512)
1650 T = T - T(1) * 512
1660 T(2) = INT (T / 64)
1670 T = T - T (2) * 64
1680 T(3) = INT (T / 8)
1690 T(4) = T - T(3) * 8
1700 RETURN
1800 XE = X:YE = Y: IF P = 1 THEN YE = YE - 1
1810 IF P = 2 THEN XE = XE + 1
1820 IF P = 3 THEN YE = YE + 1
1830 IF P = 4 THEN XE = XE - 1
1840 RETURN
3000 FOR I = 1 TO 10
3010 FOR J = 1 TO 10
3020 READ A%(J,I)
3030 NEXT J,l
3040 RETURN
3100 DATA 72,65,81,73,17,72,9,72,73,9
3110 DATA 520, 72, 1033, 520, 10%, 51 3, 576, 513, 512, 520
3120 DATA 520,576,513,520,520,8,128,74,9,520
3130 DATA 584,65,65,513,576,577,1,576,513,520
3140 DATA 520,64,129,74,9,64,137,74,1,520
3150 DATA 520,72,9,592,529,80,513,512,80,513
3160 DATA 648,514,576,1025,1032,1088,137,74,1097,9
3170 DATA 640,66,129,66,577,65,521,576,577,513
3180 DATA 136,74,137,10,72,65,577,65,9,8
3190 DATA 512,576,513,576,577,65,65,1,576,513 gfl
Brian Fitzgerald coauthored Taxman and Sheila with Greg Autry.
The two founded H.A.L. Labs in 1981, following Brian's gradua-
tion from the University of California, Irvine, with a degree in
physics and computer science. He has been playing with Apples
since 1977.
26
S O F T L I N E
New Players
Lionel Raff often felt frustrated by the trial and error involved in
solving computer games. He objected to luck being a more impor-
tant factor in successful play than logic or creativity. He took steps to
solve this problem for himself and other gamers by founding a soft-
ware company with the goal of programming games that yield their
secrets only to the application of logic — while retaining a sense of
adventure and excitement. The company is Raff-Craft.
Lionel Raff is a games player par excellence; a ranked chess play-
er and life master in the American Contract Bridge League. He is al-
so an internationally published Regents Professor in Chemistry and
was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Columbia
University.
Raff's interest in computers began in 1959 when the computers
he worked with wouldn't fit in his house, let alone on his game
table. He has followed their development with awe and excite-
ment, and by last January he could no longer resist the temptation
to get his hand into the computer-gaming action. In the wide-open
spaces of Stillwater, Oklahoma, Raff-Craft was born.
They're Off! The company's first venture is Derby Downs, al-
lowing from one to ten players to play an endless series of horse
races— one day's program at a time. Each day is unique — with all the
excitement and challenge of a day at the races. The players who can
evaluate speed, endurance, quality of the jockey, post position,
weight, and other factors that influence the outcome of real races
are the most likely to win. The tote board allows for quinellas,
exactas, perfectas, daily doubles, across the boards— just about all
the betting forms available at the races except the new pick six.
Raff-Craft's second project, tentatively titled Zartan's Cube, will
allow adventurers to compete with a consummate gamemaster for
treasures and glory. Each adventure is different to the extent that
problems change each trip, and your intelligence is increased by
successful encounters and decreased by unsuccessful ones.
For the future, Raff -Craft is negotiating with the copyright hold-
er of Bracket, the word game of deductive reasoning, for the right
to produce the computer version of the game.
Tana Maxwell, vice president of Raff-Craft and a psychologist, is
currently involved in the business end of the company but plans to
work with Raff on some realistic, fun, and educational psychologi-
cal interaction games.
For education and entertainment, the Apple seems to have
found a prime source of edifying product for its inexhaustible
appetite. gg
APPLE®* OWNERS: APOGEE OFFERS
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Magic Window
by Artsci
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A terrific adventure
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by Budgeco
Plays like real pinball,
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by Innovative Designs
You can save your
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T. G. Joysticks
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Sensible Speller
by Sensible Software
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DISTRIBUTORS
SEPTEMBER 1982
27
Adventures in Adventuring
Shhh! ! ! !
Be very quiet and you may hear the sound of muffled foot-
prints, the scratching of fingernails against a windowpane, the quiet
breathing of a stranger hidden in the next room. Look!
Is that the body of Sir Malcolm Bainbridge slumped over his
desk with a Kris plunged into his heart? Can it be that the Forsythe
emerald is missing and that the infamous Reginald Forsythe was
seen fleeing from his former wife's home? Think!
Whodunit? Can you walk in the footsteps of Holmes and Father
Brown and Marlowe and Templer and Spade and Fell and Chan?
Of course you can. You, of all the people who are interested in
the modern magic of the computer, can turn that logical, cool, well-
ordered mind to solving mysteries that are far beyond the abilities of
mortal men.
Our adventure in adventuring thus far has had a theme of fan-
tasy with a smattering of science fiction thrown in. If you've been
following these articles, you're now familiar with the techniques
used in resolving conflicts, having the computer recognize com-
mands, moving around, measuring time, and designing simple text
adventure games around these conflicts.
This month we'll deal with the handling of objects in an adven-
ture program — how to pick things up, use things, and drop them.
Our adventure has a mystery theme, in that we will be trying to re-
cover a stolen diamond of little value.
You'll probably notice that as these programs become more so-
phisticated, they become longer. Most of the length is taken up not
by the logic of the program but by the descriptive words needed to
flesh out the story. In fact, in most commercial adventure games, the
28
program takes up very little of the disk. The bulk of the disk is filled
with the wordy descriptions used to make the game interesting.
This month's program is written in sections. The rest of the arti-
cle will deal with what each section does and how it does it. Al-
though this program was written on an Apple II, it's easily adapt-
able to any small computer using Basic. The program fits into any
machine that has 4K of memory. As we go along, we'll comment on
those things peculiar to Apple Basic and what they mean.
So, without further ado, let us analyze: The Case of the Pig-
headed Diamond.
Lines 10 through 150: Line 10 clears the screen and moves the
cursor to the upper left-hand corner.
Line 15 goes to the subroutine at line 9000 which describes what
the story is all about.
Line 20 dimensions variables. These variables are for the direc-
tions used in the fifteen rooms, the room names (RN$), the eleven
nouns that the program will use ( noun$ found in data line 10160),
the descriptions for each of the nouns ( des$ ), and, finally, the room
locations for each of the objects (ob) that will be used.
Lines 30 through 140 read in the data for the dimensioned vari-
ables. Line 150 does several things. It sets the variable that keeps
track of which room we're in (variable R) to 1, it uses Apple lan-
guage so that the top line won't scroll off the screen (poke 34,7), and it
goes to line 1490. Line 1490 prints the room description at the top of
the screen.
Lines 1000 through 1070 are the parser, the thing that takes the
words and splits them into verbs and nouns. A longer explana-
tion can be found in the March issue of Softline ("Please Parse the
Zork"), but, briefly, what the parser does is find the blank between
the words and set up two separate variables, one for the noun (n7S)
and one for the verb (v7$).
Lines 1200 through 1390 are devoted to sending the program to
the routines that carry out instructions called for by the verb part of
the command. The verbs used in this program are go, the name of a
direction in which to go, inventory, quit, look, get, drop, climb ,
and dig. If the verb is none of these, this routine tells the program to
go back to the command line. Note that line 1225 requires two-
word commands except in the cases of inventory, quit, go, and the
names of directions.
Lines 1400 through 1490 are the lines that control moving
around. This is detailed in the May Softline in "From Here to There
and Back Again." Note that in line 1490 special Apple language is
again used. Home means clear the screen except for the first line,
which was locked in place by poke 34. Vtab 1 sends the cursor to
line 1 and call -868 clears the line from the cursor to the end of that
line. Then the room name is printed.
Lines 1500 through 1530 are used to print the names of the ob-
jects that are found in each room. There are eleven objects used in
this game and they are found in line 10160. Each object also has an
object variable number. The first object in the list is an ice cube. The
variable noun$( 1) contains the name ice cubes, the variable des$( 7)
contains the description of the object ice cubes and the variable
ob(l) contains the location of the object ice cubes. Since there are
fifteen rooms, if the value of ob(l) is 12, then the object is associ-
ated with room 12.
The sixteenth room does not exist as a room, but is the player
himself. Thus, if we make the value of ob(1) equal to 16, the ice
cubes are associated with the player. You see that line 1510 refers
the program to the subroutine located at lines 2200 through 2330.
Line 1510 makes X equal to the room number you're in. The sub-
routine at line 2200 then checks to see which of the eleven objects
has the same value as the room number you're in and prints them
out. And that's how the objects are shown when you move into a
particular room.
Lines 1600 through 1670 interpret the look command. Line 1610
sends us to the subroutine at line 2100, which checks to make sure
the noun is valid. If it is, line 1640 then prints the appropriate de-
scription for that noun, provided line 1620 has determined either
SOFTLINE
that the noun is in the room we're in or that we are carrying it
around. If the object is in the room and we're not carrying it, line
1630 prints, "That isn't here." Line 1660 gives us the ice cubes if we
look-in the refrigerator by making the ice cubes (ob-7) equal to our
room value. This line also sets a counter, c3, to 1, so that we are pre-
vented by line 1650 from getting more ice cubes.
Lines 1700 through 1760 allow us to pick up or get objects. Once
again, we're sent to the subroutine at 2100 to check out the validity
of the noun. Since we're room 16, if the value of the noun (ob-num-
ber) is equal to the room we're in, the value is changed to 16, which
means we're now carrying the object around. If the value of the
noun is not equal to the value of the room, then the particular ob-
ject we're trying to get is not in the room, so we can't change it to
16, so we can't get it. Simple, huh?
Lines 1900 through 1940 list out, or inventory, the objects we're
carrying. This is done simply by going to the same subroutine that
lists out the objects when we enter a room, subroutine 2200, and
having it list out the objects in room 16 — which is us.
Lines 2000 through 2080 are the drop routine. The drop routine is
the opposite of the get routine. The drop routine checks first to see
if the noun is legitimate and then to see if the object value is 16,
which means we've got it. If the noun is legitimate and we have it, its
value is changed to that of the room we're in, which means we're no
longer carrying the object. Note that if we change the values of ei-
ther object 9 or object 1 to 1 (which means we drop it while we're in
room 1), we go to the win game routine.
Lines 2100 through 2180 check the noun variable nl$ against the
list of nouns to verify it and then return to the main part of the pro-
gram. There are a couple of special situations here, though. Certain
objects— including the refrigerator, the stove, and the chandelier-
can only be looked at, not moved. Setting the variable X in line 2150
will allow an object's room value to be changed. Line 2120 prevents
this from happening by bypassing line 2150. Line 2130 prevents you
from getting the ladder until you have the shovel.
Finally a word about the pop in line 2180. Normally, you use the
word return to return from a gosub command. Note that we are
not merely returning from the gosub in line 2180 but are going back
to the command line 1010. In order to clear the gosub, Apple Basic
uses the word pop.
Lines 2200 through 2330 print out the names of nouns when the
player enters a room or does an inventory. This is pretty straightfor-
ward, except for the setting of the variable Y if a noun is printed. If Y
is not 1, it means that no nouns have been found and so nothing is
printed out by line 2320.
Lines 2500 through 2580 are the climbing the ladder and climb-
ing the bucket routines. Line 2520 checks to make sure you have ei-
ther the ladder or the bucket. If you try to climb anything else, line
2550 gives you a smart-alecky message. Line 2570 is the ladder climb-
ing routine. Note that after you climb the ladder you are given the
pendants. Note, too, that this line also changes the description, so
that if you look at the chandelier again you will see no more pen-
dants. It also sets counter cl to 1 so that if you try to climb the lad-
der again, line 2560 will not allow you to climb the ladder for more
pendants.
Lines 2600 through 2640 are the digging routine. If you look at
line 2620, you'll see that if you have the shovel (ob-10) and are in the
right spot (room 4), you can dig up the ladder. Note that when you
do, counter cl is set to 1. This prevents you from digging up the lad-
der again via line 2610. Note that if you aren't in room 4 or don't
have the shovel, line 2630 gives you another smart-alecky message.
Lines 4000 through 4030 are the winning routine. Figure them
out yourself.
Lines 4100 through 4110 are the losing message.
Lines 9000 through 9040 contain the introductory message.
Lines 10000 through 10210 are the data statements. Note that the
numbers in line 10210 are the starting rooms in which each of the
objects, in order, is located.
As you play the game, note the message you get when you look
at the bucket. Although there is no "Kick the Bucket" routine in the
program as listed here, it would be a good exercise to add one and
see how you do.
Happy adventuring.
10 TEXT : HOME
15 GOSUB 9000
20 DIM N(15), S(1 5), E(1 5), W(15), U(15), D(15), RN$(15),
NOUN$(10), DES$(10), OB(10)
30 FOR A = 1 TO 15
40 READ N(A), S(A), E(A), W(A), U(A), D(A), RN$(A)
50 NEXT A
60 FOR A = 1 TO 10
70 READ NOUN$(A)
80 NEXT A
90 FOR A = 1 TO 10
100 READ DES$(A)
110 NEXT A
120 FOR A = 1 TO 10
130 READ OB(A)
140 NEXT A
150 R = 1: POKE 34,1: GOTO 1490: REM STARTING ROOM
1000 REM PARSER
1010 V1$ = " ":N1$ = " ": PRINT "COMMAND? INPUT" ";A$
1020 FOR A = 1 TO LEN (A$)
1030 IF MID$ (A$A1) = " " THEN X = A - 1 :A = 0: GOTO 1060
1040 NEXT A
1050 V1$ = A$: GOTO 1220
1060 VI $ = LEFTS (A$,X)
1070 N1$ = RIGHTS (A$, LEN (A$) - (X + 1))
1200 REM VERB HANDLING SECTION
1210 IF VIS = "GO" THEN V1$ = N1S
1220 IF V1$ = "NORTH" OR V1$ = "SOUTH" OR VIS = "EAST"
OR V1$ = "WEST" OR VIS = "UP" OR V1$ = "DOWN"
THEN GOTO 1400
1221 IF V1$ = "INVENTORY" OR V1$ = "INV" THEN GOTO 1900
1222 IF V1$ = "QUIT" THEN GOTO 4100
1225 IF N1$ = " " THEN PRINT : PRINT "TWO WORDS, PLEASE.":
PRINT : GOTO 1010
1230 IF V1$ = "LOOK" THEN GOTO 1600
1240 IF VIS = "GET" THEN GOTO 1700
1260 IF V1$ = "DROP" THEN GOTO 2000
1280 IF VIS = "CLIMB" THEN GOTO 2500
1290 IF VIS = "DIG" THEN GOTO 2600
1390 PRINT : PRINT "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO ";V1$;".": PRINT
: GOTO 1010
1400 REM MOVING AROUND ROUTINE
1410 R1 = R
1420 IF VIS = "NORTH" AND N(R) > 0 THEN R = N(R)
1430 IF VIS = "SOUTH" AND S(R) > 0 THEN R = S(R)
1440 IF V1$ = "EAST" AND E(R) > 0 THEN R = E(R)
1450 IF V1$ = "WEST" AND W(R) > 0 THEN R = W(R)
1460 IF V1$ = "UP" AND U(R) > 0 THEN R = U(R)
1470 IF VIS = "DOWN" AND D(R) > 0 THEN R = D(R)
1480 IF R1 = R THEN PRINT : PRINT "I CAN'T MOVE THAT
WAY.": FOR X = 1 TO 1000: NEXT
1490 HOME : VTAB 1: CALL - 868: PRINT RNS(R): VTAB 24
1500 PRINT : PRINT "OBJECTS HERE ARE:": PRINT
1510 X = R: GOSUB 2200
1520 X = 0
1530 GOTO 1010
1600 REM LOOK ROUTINE
1610 GOSUB 2100
1620 IF OB(X) = R OR OB(X) = 16 THEN GOTO 1640
1630 PRINT : PRINT "THAT ISNT HERE": PRINT : GOTO 1670
1640 PRINT : PRINT DES$(X): PRINT
1650 IF C3 = 1 THEN GOTO 1670
1660 IF X = 6 THEN OB(1) = 16: PRINT : PRINT "WOW...YOU'VE
GOT SOME ICECUBES.": PRINT :C3 = 1
SEPTEMBE R 1982
29
1670 X = 0: GOTO 1010
1700 REM GET STARTS HERE
1710 GOSUB 2100
1720 IF OB(X) = R OR OB(X) = 16 THEN GOTO 1740
1730 PRINT : PRINT "THAT ISNT HERE.": PRINT : GOTO 1760
1740 IF X > 0 THEN OB(X) = 16
1750 PRINT : PRINT "YOU'VE GOT THE ";NOUN$(X);" PRINT
1760 X = 0: GOTO 1010
1900 REM INVENTORY ROUTINE
1910 X = 16
1920 PRINT : PRINT "YOU ARE CARRYING: PRINT
1930 GOSUB 2200
1940 GOTO 1010
2000 REM DROP ROUTINE
2010 GOSUB 2100
2020 IF OB(X) = 16 THEN GOTO 2040
2030 PRINT : PRINT "I DONT HAVE THAT": PRINT : GOTO 2060
2040 OB(X) = R
2050 PRINT : PRINT "I'VE DROPPED THE ";NOUN$(X): PRINT
2060 IF OB(9) = 1 THEN GOTO 4010
2070 IF OB(1) = 1 THEN GOTO 4020
2080 GOTO 1010
2100 REM ROUTINE FOR CHECKING NOUN
2110 IF V1$ = "LOOK" THEN GOTO 2140
2120 IF N1$ = NOUN$(7) OR N1$ = NOUN$(6) OR N1$ =
NOUN$(5) THEN PRINT : PRINT "YOU CAN ONLY
LOOK.. .YOU CAN'T TAKE.": PRINT : GOTO 2180
2130 IF N1$ = NOUN$(2) AND C2 = 0 THEN PRINT : PRINT
"UGH, IT'S STUCK. YOU'LL HAVE TO DIG IT OUT.": PRINT :
GOTO 2180
2140 FOR A = 1 TO 10
2150 IF N1$ = NOUN$(A) THEN X = A:A = 0: RETURN
2160 NEXT
2170 PRINT : PRINT "I DON'T SEE " ;N1$;"..."
2180 POP : PRINT : GOTO 1010
2200 REM ROUTINE FOR LISTING OUT OBJECTS
2210 IF X = OB(1) THEN PRINT "ICECUBES":Y = 1
2220 IF X = OB(2) THEN PRINT "LADDER":Y = 1
2230 IF X = OB(3) THEN PRINT "MATCHES":Y = 1
2240 IF X = OB (4) THEN PRINT "BUCKET":Y = 1
2250 IF X = OB(5) THEN PRINT "STOVE":Y = 1
2260 IF X = OB(6) THEN PRINT "REFRIGERATOR":Y = 1
2270 IF X = OB(7) THEN PRINT "CHANDELIER":Y = 1
2280 IF X = OB(8) THEN PRINT "PIG":Y = 1
2290 IF X = OB(9) THEN PRINT "PENDANTS":Y = 1
2300 IF X = OB(10) THEN PRINT "SHOVEL":Y = 1
2310 IF Y = 0 THEN PRINT "NOTHING"
2320 PRINT
2330 Y = 0: RETURN
2500 REM CLIMBING ROUTINE
2510 IF OB(2) = 16 OR OB(4) = 16 THEN GOTO 2530
2520 PRINT : PRINT "YOU HAVE TO GET THE PROPER OBJECT
BEFORE YOU CAN CLIMB IT.": PRINT : GOTO 1010
2530 IF N1$ = NOUN$(4) THEN PRINT : PRINT "THE BUCKET IS
VERY UNSTABLE... YOU TRIP, FALL OFF AND BREAK YOUR
GREAT TOE WHICH RENDERS YOU INCAPABLE OF
FINISHING THE GAME.": GOTO 4100
2540 IF N1$ = NOUN$(2) THEN GOTO 2560
2550 PRINT : PRINT "YOU CANT CLIMB A ";N1$;" ":PRINT :
GOTO 1010
2560 IF Cl = 1 THEN GOTO 2580
2570 IF R = 7 THEN PRINT : PRINT "YOU HAVE OBTAINED
SOME SHINY DIAMOND-LIKE PENDANTS HANGING ON
THE CHANDELIER. YOU CLIMB DOWN THE
LADDER.": DES$(7) = "THERE ARE NO MORE PENDANTS
HERE, GREEDY.": PRINT :C1 = 1:OB(9) = 16: GOTO 1010
2580 PRINT : PRINT "YOU CLIMB UP THE LADDER, FIND
NOTHING AND CLIMB BACK DOWN.": PRINT : GOTO
1010
2600 REM DIGGING ROUTINE
2610 IF C2 = 1 THEN PRINT : PRINT "YOU'VE ALREADY GOT A
LADDER. ONLY ONE TO A CUSTOMER.": PRINT : GOTO
2640
2620 IF OB(10) = 16 AND R = 4 THEN PRINT : PRINT "THE
LADDER IS LOOSE AND YOU CAN GET IT.": PRINT :C2 = 1:
GOTO 2640
2630 PRINT : PRINT "I DIG IT BUT YOU AREN'T IN THE RIGHT
PLACE WITH THE RIGHT IMPLEMENT": PRINT
2640 GOTO 1010
4000 REM WINNING ROUTINE
4010 PRINT : PRINT "THOUGHT YOU COULD FOOL ME WITH
THOSE CRUMMY ";NOUN$(9)".": PRINT "YOU LOSE.":
GOTO 4100
4020 IF OB(3) = 1 THEN PRINT : PRINT "THE MATCHES FLARE UP
AND MELT THE ICECUBES AND OUT FALLS A CHEAP
INDUSTRIAL GRADE DIAMOND. NOT MUCH, BUT
ENOUGH TO WIN.": PRINT : GOTO 4100
4030 PRINT : PRINT "NICE TRY; BUT THOSE DARN CUBES ARE
SO HARD I CAN'T TELL IF YOU'VE WON OR NOT.": PRINT
: GOTO 1010
4100 REM ROUTINE TO END PROGRAM
4110 TEXT : HTAB 10: PRINT " 'BYE": END
9000 HTAB (5): PRINT "THE CASE OF THE PIG-HEADED
DIAMOND": PRINT
9010 PRINT "YOU HAVE BEEN RETAINED TO RECOVER THE
FAMOUS 'PIG' DIAMOND STOLEN FROM THE SMALL
MANSION OF CARLYSLE SMEDLEY GRUM."
9020 PRINT : PRINT "YOU KNOW THERE IS A DEATH TRAP ON
THE ESTATE SO YOU MUST BE CAREFUL."
9030 PRINT : PRINT "GOOD LUCK!"
9040 PRINT : PRINT "TO PLAY, PRESS ANY KEY: GET A$:
RETURN
10000 REM DATA STARTS HERE
10010 DATA 2, 0,0, 0,0,0, "DIAMOND BANK.. .DROP THEM HERE
TO WIN."
10020 DATA 3,1 ,0,0, 0,0, "LONG SHADY ROAD"
10030 DATA 5, 2, 0,0, 0,0, "BOTTOM OF HILL"
10040 DATA 0,0, 5, 0,0,0, "DUSTY GARAGE"
10050 DATA 8, 2, 6, 4, 0,0, "OPEN FRONT DOOR"
10060 DATA 0,0, 0,5, 0,0, "OVERGROWN GARDEN"
10070 DATA 10, 0,8, 0,0,0, "LIBRARY"
10080 DATA 11, 5, 9, 7, 0,0, "FRONT HALLWAY"
10090 DATA 12, 0,0, 8, 0,0, "LIVING ROOM"
10100 DATA 13, 7, 11, 0,0,0, "BATH ROOM"
10110 DATA 14, 8, 12, 10, 0,0, "MIDDLE HALLWAY"
10120 DATA 0,9, 0,11, 0,0, "KITCHEN"
10130 DATA 0,10, 14, 0,0,0, "BEDROOM"
10140 DATA 0,11, 0,13, 0,15, "FAR HALLWAY"
10150 DATA 0,0, 0,0, 14,0, "DANK CELLAR"
10160 DATA "ICECUBES", "LADDER", "MATCHES", "BUCKET",
"STOVE", "REFRIGERATOR", "CHANDELIER", "PIG",
"PENDANTS", "SHOVEL"
10170 DATA "THEY LOOK LIKE SOME EXTREMELY HARD
FROZEN ICECUBES.", "IT IS A RICKETY, SHAKY
LADDER.", "THE BOOK OF MATCHES SAYS, 'ENROLL NOW
IN BASIC COMPUTER PROGRAMMING COURSE.' ","THE
BUCKET HAS A SIGN ON IT SAYING 'DONT KICK ME.' "
10180 DATA "IT IS AN OLD FASHIONED GAS STOVE.", "THE
REFRIGERATOR CREAKS AND GROANS BUT IT APPEARS
TO BE WORKING. THERE ARE SOME ICECUBES IN
IT.", "THE CHANDELIER HAS SOME BRIGHT SHINY
DIAMOND-LIKE PENDANTS HANGING FROM IT."
10190 DATA "IT IS A SHROPSHIRE SHOAT, SOUND ASLEEP,
WHICH WAS HOGGING THE BATHROOM.", "THE
PENDANTS APPEAR TO BE DIAMONDS."
10200 DATA "THE SHOVEL IS RUSTY AND LOOKS LIKE YOU
COULD CUT YOURSELF ON IT."
10210 DATA 0,4,15,1,12,12,7,10,0,6 gQ
30
S O F T L I N E
Apple II Graphics
by KEN WILLIAMS
We've talked about how your Apple's memory is laid out, how
to poke stuff into memory to effect the display, how to work with bi-
nary, hex, and decimal numbers, and how to animate using shapes.
This month, we'll explore the world of byte-move animation.
This technique is very different from animating with shape tables
and is used in many of today's computer games.
When you create a shape in hi-res, what you are really doing is
giving the computer a set of directions to follow when it draws the
shape on the screen. (For an explanation of defining shapes, refer to
chapter 9 in your Applesoft manual.) Every time the shape is drawn
or Xdrawn, your computer follows those directions (for instance,
plot the first point, then move up, then move to the left twice with-,
out plotting, then plot that point and move down one . . .) to re-
create the shape on the screen.
That procedure is fine for some applications, but each compo-
nent instruction must be processed every time the shape is drawn,
and that is relatively slow since even a simple shape can easily con-
tain a hundred instructions. Speed is one of the primary require-
ments for smooth, flicker-free animation in which the figures seem
to appear on the screen instantaneously.
Byte-Size Pieces. The idea behind byte-move graphics is to trans-
late any desired figure into the corresponding data values and then
poke those values directly onto the screen instead of using shapes to
draw the figure. Type in the following program and run it. If you
want to spare your fingers, you may omit the rem statements.
10 REM INITIALIZE Y
20 REM COORDINATES
30 REM
40 Y1% = 1:Y2% = 2:Y3% = 3:Y4% = 4:Y5% = 5:Y6% =
6:Y7% = 7
50 REM
60 REM READ DATA FOR FIGURE
70 REM
80 FOR I = 1 TO 4: REM 4 FRAMES
90 FOR J = 1 TO 7: REM 7 BYTES PER FRAME
100 READ V%(I,J)
110 NEXT J,l
120 REM
130 REM INITIALIZE ADDRESSES
140 REM OF Y COORDINATES
150 REM
160 Y%(1) = 8192: Y%(2) = 9216:Y%(3) = 10240:Y%(4) =
11264:Y%(5) = 12288:Y%(6) = 13312:Y%(7) = 14336
170 HGR
180 REM
190 REM POKE THE FOUR FRAMES
200 REM
210 FOR I = 1 TO 4
220 POKE Y%(Y1 %),V%(I,1) :
POKE Y%(Y7%),V%(I,7)
230 POKE Y% ( Y2%) , V% (1,2) :
POKE Y%(Y6%),V%(I,6)
240 POKE Y%(Y3%),V°/o(l,3):
POKE Y%(Y5%),V%(I,5) :
POKE Y% ( Y4%), V% (1,4)
250 NEXT
260 GOTO 210: REM START AGAIN
270 REM
280 REM DATA FOR THE FOUR FRAMES
290 REM
300 DATA 1,2,4,8,16,32,64
310 DATA 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8
320 DATA 64,32,16,8,4,2,1
330 DATA 0,0,0,127,0,0,0
If you managed to type everything in correctly, you'll see what
passes for an airplane propeller spinning in the corner of your moni-
tor screen. You must have noticed the delay in running the pro-
gram before the animation began. That is a characteristic of byte-
move graphics, even in the professional games, and it is caused by
the need to initialize several tables before the animation can take
place.
In our listing, line 40 sets the seven Y coordinates used in the fig-
ure and line 160 assigns the seven corresponding addresses. Lines 80
through 110 set up a table that contains four versions of the prop,
each in a different rotation and each using seven screen lines.
To understand this, let's look at a diagram of each of the four
frames, where X indicates a screen dot turned on, and - represents
an off dot.
Although the figure appears to rotate like a propeller, the pro-
gram is actually flashing the four frames onto the screen sequential-
ly. It happens quickly enough that your eyes and brain are fooled in-
to thinking the rotation is continuous— the poke is quicker than
the eye!
Frame #1 in figure 1 shows the propeller running diagonally, and
it also gives the binary bit pattern used to produce each dot pattern
(remember, the dots are displayed as the reverse of the bits in each
byte) and the equivalent decimal value. If the translation from dot
pattern to binary and decimal value overloads your brain, go get
something to drink, and then reread the third article in the series
where we discuss the (many) peculiarities of hi-res graphics. The
decimal values calculated in figure 1 correspond with the data val-
ues you see in lines 300 through 310.
The true heart of the program is the loop from lines 210 to 250
where each frame in turn is poked into hi-res screen memory. Us-
ing variables in the poke statements obscures the mechanics of what
we're doing, but it also enhances the execution, as it takes more time
for the computer to generate a number such as 12288 than it does to
look that value up in an array.
The other reason for all the variables is that we are going to alter
the routine to allow the propeller to be placed at any Y coordinate
on the screen. The array Y% will contain the starting addresses for
SCREEN
BINARY
DECI-
SCREEN
BINARY
DECI-
PATTERN VALUE
MAL
PATTERN
VALUE
MAL
X
0000 0001
1
—X—
0000 1000
8
-X- —
0000 0010
2
— X—
0000 1000
8
--X —
0000 0100
4
— X—
0000 1000
8
— X—
0000 1000
8
—X—
0000 1000
8
— X-
0001 0000
16
— X—
0000 1000
8
X-
0010 0000
32
— X—
0000 1000
8
x
0100 0000
64
—X—
0000 1000
8
FRAME #1
FRAME #2
SCREEN
BINARY
DECI-
SCREEN
BINARY
DECI-
PATTERN VALUE
MAL
PATTERN
VALUE
MAL
x
0100 0000
64
0000 0000
0
. — x-
0010 0000
32
0000 0000
0
— x-
0001 0000
16
0000 0000
0
— X—
0000 1000
8
XXXXXXX
0111 1111
127
-X —
0000 0100
4
0000 0000
0
-X- —
0000 0010
2
0000 0000
0
X
0000 0001
1
0000 0000
0
FRAME #3
FRAME #4
Figure 1.
SEPTEMBER 1982
31
each line of the screen, and Y1% through Y 7% will contain the
seven Y coordinates used in the figure.
But let's get back to those poke statements. Line 220 pokes the
first and seventh bytes, V%(l,1) and V%(l,7), line 230 pokes the sec-
ond and sixth, and line 240 pokes the third, fifth, and fourth bytes.
The bytes are poked in that peculiar order to improve the image,
but you might like the effect obtained by poking the seven bytes in
numerical order instead. Try it!
The propeller is an example of stationary animation; that is to say
that though the prop moves, it always stays in the same position on
the screen as it does so. Most figures you use in a game need to
move around the screen, so we'll alter our program shortly to allow
that. There are, however, many applications for stationary anima-
tion; the Applevision demo on your DOS 3.3 System Master is an
example, as is putting a scoreboard on the hi-res screen. In the
instance of the scoreboard, the frames would not be pictures of a
moving object; instead you would use successive digits.
Drop the Prop. With the previous program still in memory, type
in the following lines:
160 GOSUB 1000: REM CALC ADDRESSES
245 Y1% = Y1% + 1: Y2% = Y2% + 1:
Y3% = Y3% + 1 : Y4% = Y4% + 1 :
Y5% = Y5% + 1: Y6% = Y6% + 1:
Y7% = Y7% + 1
1000 REM
1010 REM CALCULATE Y
1020 REM COORDINATES
1030 REM
1040 DIM Y%(192)
1050 FOR I = 1 TO 185 STEP 8: READ SA%
1060 FOR J = 0 TO 7:Y%(I + J) = SA% + J * 1024
1070 NEXT J,l
1080 DATA 81 92, 8320, 8448, 8576, 8704, 8832, 8960, 9088
THE MASTER GUIDE
• FAST FANTASY GAME CHARACTER GENERATOR •
• Adventure-Style Market Place
• Multi-classed, and Two-class Characters
• Stores up to 70 Characters & Equipment on Disk
• Full Printer Capabilities (most brands)
• Update Characters to ANY LEVEL, FAST!
For APPLE II plus with one disk drive
Send $29.95 plus $1.00 Postage & Handling (Calif. Res. Add 6% Sales Tax)
COMPUTER DIVERSIONS. BOX 214. 1011 Camino del Mar. Del Mar. CA 92014
Allow six weeks for delivery. Apple is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.
32
1090 DATA 8232,8360,8488,8616,8744,8872,9000,9128
1100 DATA 8272,8400,8528,8656,8784,891 2,9040,91 68
1110 RETURN
Lines 1000 through 1110 calculate the starting addresses for each
of the 192 lines on the screen in the same way you would find them
if you were to use the method described (albeit sketchily) on page
21 of your Apple II Reference Manual. After each frame of the
prop is poked onto the screen, line 245 increments each of the
seven Y coordinates so that the next frame will appear one line be-
low the last.
Run the modified program, and you'll see the propeller spin-
ning as it drops down the left side of the screen. You will also see a
trail of garbage left behind as the figure progresses.
Oh well, you couldn't have a program work right the first time,
could you? Most of the figure is erased when the next frame is
drawn over it, but since each frame is lowered one line, the top line
of each frame remains to haunt you.
The problem is easily remedied by inserting:
244 Y0% = Y1%
215 POKE Y%(Y0%),0
Line 244 sets Y0% to the coordinates of the top line, and line 215
pokes a zero into that address in order to erase the old top line.
Now, when you run the program, the picture moves down the
screen without leaving a trail.
So Much for the Easy Stuff. So far you have done a stationary ani-
mation and a vertical animation using byte-move, but we have left
horizontal animation for last. Type in and run the following
routine:
10 HGR
20 FOR L = 8192 TO 8231
30 POKE L - 1,0: REM ERASE PREVIOUS BYTE
40 POKE L,127
50 FOR I = 1 TO 50: NEXT I
60 NEXT L
The program is short and simple, and it moves a line across the
screen quickly, even with the delay loop. But it has one drawback
fatal to any game: the animation is jerky instead of being nice and
smooth. Poking the value 127 turns on all seven dots of a byte, and if
you increase the delay, you'll see that the line moves in one-byte in-
crements, which explains the uneven movement. The answer is ele-
gant, though not without problems: move the figure along one dot
at a time.
Imagine that you are looking out a window that is seven dots
wide, and that the line crawls across your field of vision. At first you
see only the leading dot, then the first two dots, then three, four,
and so on until all seven dots are visible through the window. Then,
as the line continues, the leading dot moves out of range, then the
second dot follows; that continues until the window is empty.
In computer terms, the window is one byte of memory, and
when just the lead dot of the line is showing in a byte, the other six
dots are showing in the previous byte. In that case, you need one
byte with just the left-most dot on, and another with the six right-
hand dots on; the values 1 (0000 0001) and 126 (0111 1110) will do the
trick. Again, remember that the bit pattern is the reverse of the de-
sired dot pattern. (Curses!) From Basic type:
HGR
POKE 8192,126: POKE 8193,1
POKE 8192,124: POKE 8193,3
POKE 8192,120: POKE 8193,7
POKE 8192,112: POKE 8193,15
POKE 8192,96: POKE 8193,31
POKE 8192,64: POKE 8193,63
POKE 8192,0: POKE 8193,127
It is another characteristic of byte-move graphics that each fig-
ure requires seven shifted copies, or separations. That means that a
S O F T L I N E
figure one byte wide actually requires two bytes, a two byte figure
requires three bytes, and so on.
Entering each pair of pokes shifts the line one dot to the right, so
the cumulative effect is to move the line slowly across the screen.
You could continue the process by poking the same sequence of
values into locations 8193 and 8194, but at that rate it would take you
several hours to go all the way across. The following program does
essentially that, but faster.
10 DIM A%(280) : REM 280 X COORDINATES
20 REM
30 REM READ THE VALUES FOR
40 REM THE 7 PAIRS OF FRAMES
50 REM
60 FOR I = 0 TO 6
70 READ T%(I),H%(I)
80 NEXT I
90 REM
100 HGR
110 REM
120 REM INITIALIZE THE TABLE
130 REM OF ADDRESSES
140 REM
150 J = 0
160 FOR I = 8192 TO 8231
170 A%(J) = l:J = J + 1
180 NEXT
190 REM
200 REM PLOT THE LINE AT
210 REM EACH X COORDINATE
220 REM
230 FOR X = 1 TO 280
240 Q% = I NT (X / 7)
250 R% = X - (7 * Q%)
260 C% = Q% + 1
270 POKE A%(Q%),T%(R%) : POKE A % ( C % ) , H % ( R °/o )
280 NEXT X
290 END
294 REM
295 REM DATA TABLE
2% REM
300 DATA 126,1,124,3,120,7,112,15
310 DATA 96,31,64,63,0,127
Again, we use variables to speed up the program and confuse the
reader. The values for the line are read into arrays T% (for tail) and
H% (head) in lines 30 to 80, and array A% contains the addresses for
each of the forty bytes across the top of the screen and is initialized
in lines 120 through 180. The loop from 230 to 280 plots the line at
every X coordinate across the screen, but lines 240, 250, and 260
merit more study.
The purpose of these lines is to determine which pair of bytes is
being used and which of the seven pairs of values need to be poked.
They do that by dividing the X coordinate by 7, and calculating the
quotient (Q%) and the remainder (R%). For example, when the X
coordinate is 73, seven g'zinta 73 (do you remember your g'zintas?)
ten times, with three left over. So you need to poke the tenth and
eleventh bytes with the third pair of values.
As you can see, even as simple a figure as the line requires seven
different versions and significant preparation to animate horizon-
tally, but the animation that results is as smooth as you could wish
for, even if it is a bit slow. Most games are written in machine lan-
guage to take advantage of the better speed of execution, but these
examples in Basic serve to give you the idea.
Next time, we'll talk about ways you can streamline animation by
doing partial modifications, preshifting, and precomputing. After
that, we'll talk about some of the methods used to detect collisions
between objects on the screen.
But for now, you have enough stuff to make your head hurt un-
til the next issue arrives. 0!
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SEPTEMBE R 1982
33
PINBALL HAS GONE INTO ORBIT!
Now that you’ve conquered pool hall pinball,
it’s time to take your Apple* into outer space
ZERO
GRAVITY
PINBALL
A machine
language arcade
game with full-
color hi-res
graphics, and
sounds like
you’ve never
heard before.
ZERO GRAVITY PINBALL $29.95 plus postage
Requires game paddle 0, Apple II*. with Applesoft* ROM, 48K, DOS 3.2 or 3.3
ask your dealer or order direct
AVANT-GARDE CREATIONS
P.O. Box 30160
Eugene, OR 97403
(503) 345-3043
'Apple II. Applesoft are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
CK£A. T/ QMS
VISA/MasterCard accepted
Game/Publisher
ABM^Muse
Action Quest, )V Software
Alien Ambush, Peter Fokos
Alien Descent (TRS-80)
Alien Rain, Broderbund
Alien Swarm, I n-Home
Alien Typhoon, Broderbund
Andromeda, Gebelli
Apple Panic (Apple), Broderbund
Apple Panic (Atari), Broderbund
Asteroid Field, Cavalier
Asteroids, Atari
Autobahn, Sirius
Avalanche, Atari
Bandits, Sirius
Beer Run, Sirius
Bezman, Bez
Bez-Off, Bez
Blister Ball, Creative Computing
Blister Ball, Creative Computing
Borg, Sirius
Bug Attack (Apple), Cavalier
Bug Attack (Atari), Cavalier
Cannonball Blitz, Sierra On-Line
Canyon Climber (Atari), Datasoft
Caverns of Mars, Atari
Ceiling Zero, T urnkey
Chicken (Atari), Synapse
Chipout, California Pacific
Clowns and Balloons (Atari), Datasoft
Congo, Sentient
Cosmo Mission, Astar Int'l
County Fair, DataMost
Cricketeer, Software Farm
Crossfire (Apple), Sierra On-Line
Crossfire (Atari), Sierra On-Line
Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, Epyx
Cyclod (Apple), Sirius
Cyclod (Atari), Sirius
Dark Forest, Sirius
Datestones of Ryn, Epyx
David's Midnight Magic, Broderbund
Dodge Racer, Synapse
Dogfight, Micro Lab
Dragon's Eye, Epyx
Eliminator, Adventure Int'l
Epoch, Sirius
Escape, Muse
Escape from Arcturus, Synergistic
Falcons, Piccadilly
Firebird, Gebelli
Firebug, Muse
Galactic Chase, Prism
Galactic Empire, Broderbund
Galactic Quest, Crystalware
Galaxy Travel, Tokumo
Galaxy Wars, Broderbund
Gamma Goblins, Sirius
Genetic Drift, Broderbund
Ghost Hunter, Arcades Plus
Goblins, Highlands
Golden Mountain, Broderbund
Gold Rush, Sentient
Gorgon, Sirius
Guardian, Continental
Hadron, Sirius
Head-On, California Pacific
High Orbit, Gebelli
Florizon V, Gebelli
Human Fly, CPU
Hungry Boy, California Pacific
Int'l Gran Prlx, Riverbank
Intruder Alert, Dynacomp
Invasion Force, Computhings
lawbreaker (Apple), Sierra On-Line
lawbreaker (Atari), Sierra On-Line
Jellyfish, Sirius
Juggler, I DSI
Kamikaze, Hayden
K-Razy Shoot-Out, K-Byte
Kayos, Computer Magic
labyrinth, Broderbund
Laf Pale Apple Zap, Sierra On-Line
Laf Pak: Creepy Corridors, Sierra On-Line
Laf Pak: Mine Sweep, Sierra On-Line
Laser Maze, Avant-Garde
Lazer Silk, Gebelli
Lemmings, Sirius
Marauder, Sierra On-Line
Mar Tesoro, Syncro
Score Player
•Verified score
92,500 Peter Sivo, Saratoga, CA
20/82 Steve Halberstadt, Newark, DE
•84,600 Derin Basden, Fresno, CA
164,350 Chris Athanas, Topsham, MA
1,103,000 Ron Bunch, Collegedale, TN
•69,200 Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*685,680 Denise Achram, Canton, Ml
• 53,500 |oey Grisaff i, Houston, TX
*546,320 James Baker, Alexandria, VA
675,840 Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
623,000 Jeff Feldman, Miami Beach, FL
*1,274,180 Ken Williams, Niles, OH
2,179 Miles Mark Hall, Lake Oswego, OR
*1,812 Brian Hall, Milford, Ml
•313,310 Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
*8,626 Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
110,769 Harry llg, Chesterfield, MO
27,156 Norman Humbert, Fountain Valley, CA
7,164 (2 player) Kerry Shetline, Neil Radick, Morristown, NJ
*331 (1 player) Klaus Liebold, Poway, CA
•18,960
N^att Sesow, Lincoln, NE
140,000
David Porter, Hillsdale, IN
*42,926
Chris Conway, Winnetka, CA
*1,000,000
Ron Bunch, Collegedale, TN
*216,000
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*7%, 900
„ Tak Szeto, Boston, MA
*71,490
- - Denise Achram, Canton, Ml
*630,400
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*21,630
Jason Meggs, Bethesda, MD
58,500
Joey Grisaffi, Houston, TX
*27,154
Mark McKeown, San Jose, CA
*7,890
Matt Skinner, Foster City, CA
*2,369
Derin Basden, Fresno, CA
41,210
Rod Nelson, program author
*1,120,310
Brian Condon, Marietta, GA
*944,450
Bryan Lum, San Francisco, CA
1,290
Ledru Corlett, Runaway Bay, TX
28,470
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
40,297
Chris Conway, Winnetka, CA
*16,364
Allen Holland, Downey, CA
*5,530
Eric Vesper, Saint Louis, MO
*1,690,480
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
*4,614
Ed Mixon, Ypsilanti, Ml
3,390
Hugh Godfrey, Phoenix, AZ
2,905
Adam Newman, Teaneck, NJ
*235,900
Dave King, Los Altos Hills, CA
542,040
Fred Nisewanger, Fremont, CA
*41,200
Dick Nitto, Binghamton, NY
*5,735
Steve Rothenberg, Mayfield Hts., OH
223,048
Jim David, Lyndhurst, OH
555,550
Andrew MacKenzie, San Francisco, CA
*9,125
Matt Yuen, North Hollywood, CA
106,220
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
3,217
Jeff Parrish, Overland Park, KS
*10,090
Jim Kelton, Huntington Beach, CA
*51,320
Randy Hayes, Yuba City, CA
53,700
Brian Donnelly, Ipswich, MA
*18,160
Bob Farr, Trenton, NJ
*1,020,000
Tom Bredehoft, Columbus, OH
78,860
Steve T retick, Wheaton, MD
315
Linda Stix, Seattle, WA
2,202,400
Scott Sanchez, San Juan Capistrano, CA
*2,136,000
Lee Stafford, Phoenix, AZ
*67,900
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
*16,660
Al Tommervik, North Hollywood, CA
256,170
Steven Mundy, Ballwin, MO
234,580
Steve Cloutier, East Greenwich, Rl
5,570
David Durkee, Burbank, CA
*58,405
Jim Stockla, Shelton, CT
*143
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
*39,040
Dale Monson, Denver, CO
*33
Brent Shaw, Yorktown, NY
3,633
Randy Dellinger, Fort Belvoir, VA
15,820
Jon Hickey, Narragausett, Rl
267,650
Gregg Rosendin, San Jose, CA
*176,310
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*290,000
Eric Vesper, Saint Louis, MO
*206,380
Matt Cox, New City, NY
*4,560
Jason Meggs, Bethesda, MD
97,200
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*19,300
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
54,610
Don Carlston, Iowa City, IA
*31,435
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
*4,100
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
*4,409
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
*9,856
Roe R. Adams III, Hartford, CT
*45,700
Rob Berkowitz, Goldens Bridge, NY
*58,638
Donald Brown, Des Moines, IA
*173,900
Christian Juhring, Carmel, CA
149,561,409
Michael Prater; Glendale, CA
HIGH
SCORES
Next high-score deadline: 9:00 p.m., October 9.
Highlines
Who knows what evil lurks . . .?
"Why didn't you report my high score?" Well, it's like
this:
High scores for Snoggle, aka Puckman, and Olympic
Decathlon will no longer be accepted. Yes, certain per-
sons have discovered how to finagle the scores on these
fine games, thus spoiling things for the rest of us. The
weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Also, high scores on
Centipede have been suspended until such time as Atari
releases the game. It seems a few of you out there are
playing the drastically simple prerelease copies and the
game stands to undergo substantial (that is, competitive)
changes before it's finally released. Thanks to David
Plotkin for the tip, and also for clearing up the Asteroids
controversy. ("Using 'flipover' or 'no effect' racks up
points at twice the rate that using 'shields' or 'hyper-
space' does." Fair enough.) Peter Clark reports that you
can type in any score you want at the end of Odyssey.
Odyssey scores will therefore be verifiable in the future
by witness only, no photos or screen dumps; ditto Tax-
man. By the way, Peter, Atlantis, in Apventure to Atlan-
tis, is the really big island with the castle. (If in doubt, use
the direction finder.)
Alas, the most excellent Star Blazer and Choplifter
must also fall by the wayside. The maximum possible
scores on both these games have been achieved by quite
a few players. All such games, along with very old games,
or games from defunct companies, generally will not be
appearing here (fare thee well, Crop Duster). . . . Finally,
if your high score doesn't fall into any of these catego-
ries and you're still wondering why you don't see it here-
in, know this: if we've never heard of the game, and you
don't tell us the name of the publisher or the computer
on which you played it, your name is that much less like-
ly to make the rolls. This means you, Lee and Carole
Hampton. We don't know Myriapede, and Crofton,
Maryland, information doesn't know you. Let's make
things easy for each other.
Kudos to Roe Adams for diabolically beating out last is-
sue's Most Incredibly High Score (Mar Tesoro) with his
performance on Taipanl He quit playing when he found
he could make more profit by leaving his money in the
bank, collecting interest, than by trading. His biggest
deal: $1.2 billion for ten thousand units of opium at
$102,000 per unit. Nice work if you can get it.
The Tranquility Base challenge was answered by Brian
Donnelly ("I don't mean to blow your mind but 1,620 is
my new high score and I was burning it on those padsl I
took a picture and will be sending it to all you disbe-
lievers!"), but the point was rendered moot by Matt
Rosenbaum, who took four pictures of the screen every
time he beat the previous high and had his feat wit-
nessed by his brother. Brian Fargo rebuts Norman Fong's
challenge with the revelation that while some versions of
Swashbuckler roll over at 255, others, like his, do not.
Verification: the controversy heats up. On one side,
Ken Mikoloj ("I have no picture, but don't worry about
it! I'll just do it again and make sure I have my camera
handy") and Shane Rolin ("I have no verification but I
trust you will take my word for these feats"), among
others, and on the other side a growing number of con-
cerned gamers who are pushing for absolute, positive
verification for every single score. We shall probably
have to call for a referendum soon, before the revolu-
About verification by witness, still the easiest and
best: it does not consist of writing, "This score was veri-
fied by my mother/cousin/iguana . . it consists of
someone else applying their signature to the medium
upon which you have recorded your score, in witness
thereof.
Warner Young would like to know how to turn off the
sound in Atari Crossfire.
SEPTEMBER 1982
35
HIGH
SCORES
Next high-score deadline: 9:00 p.m., October 9.
Hjghlines
John Hickey would like to know how long the present
and previous title holders lor Falcons had the game be-
fore posting their highs. He can't seem to make any
progress.
Our sympathies to Peter Cordon, who played Snake
Byte all night before going to bed (leaving the computer
on, at risk of great peril from his father), and was about to
wake up his sisters the next morning to show them his
high score when a power failure hit Teaneck, New Jer-
sey, and all was lost.
Fred Nisewanger, thirteen, has not been able to figure
out how to get past the first chasm in Wizard and the
Princess. Someone drop him a note, via Directline, or
maybe two halves of a note. (Hmmm. . . .)
Eric Snider emerged the victor from an eleventh-hour
intercontinental struggle with Eric Popejoy for suprem-
acy in Serpentine. (There is certainly no significance in
the similarities between Mr. Snider's name and home-
town and that of program author David Snider — he
didn't get his copy before anyone else or anything like
that, heck no.) Snider wants to know if we will return
disks used as verification of high scores. Yes, if a disk
mailer with return address and adequate postage is
included.
Bravo Mark Adams for refusing to contribute to the cli-
mate of paranoia that so plagues these modern times.
Rather than dispute Jeff Parish's score in Galactic Em-
pire, he altered the program so he could conquer all
nineteen star systems in under three years, and was
amazed to see his score was only 2,047. "I am not calling
Jeff Parish a liar; maybe he has a different version than
mine, or a vivid imagination," muses Mark. Or maybe the
Empire frowns on alterations.
A.J. Benway's Caverns of Mars challenge to Shane Ro-
lin (By the way, Shane, do you live in Pittsburgh or Mon-
roeville? Do you commute?) must now include Tak Sze-
to, whose verification photo, we admit, did not include
the name of the game in the screen display. A.J.'s mathe-
matical calculations of the highest possible score go as
follows: "The maximum points possible per one section
of cavern is 6,400. There are five sections per cavern, and
there are five caverns in the game. Now let's compute!
6,400 x 5 sections = 32,000 points per cavern. To 32,000 we
add 20,000 for shooting every possible obstacle (impos-
sible). 32,000 + 20,000 = 52,000, multiplied by five cav-
erns, equals 260,000 maximum possible points. Please
have Mr. Rolin explain!"
A good try by nine-year-old brownbelt Craig "Karate
Kid" Rankinen on Canyon Climber — just not good
enough. In fact, not even close. Maybe someday when
you're older, Kid. No hard feelings, right? Shake. Hey,
what. . . ? No, wait! No! Yaaaaah!!
No, Lee Stanford, the boot bug in your Russki Duck
that lets you "gain points very fast" is not a "loophole,"
something that a gamer discovers through intensive play
and close observation, utilizing to best strategic advan-
tage. The true gamer scorns the artificial advantages of
bugs as dishonorable. All the scores that have been
creeping in for the so-called lawbreaker II fall into that
category, a deviation that offers invulnerability, big to-
tals, and a good time, but at what cost? Let's all take a les-
son from Patrick E. Bachelder, P.E., who discovered the
tendency of Stellar Invaders not to reset after the last
creature is destroyed, leaving the commander flying
around indefinitely at twenty points a shot. Disdaining
the seeming opportunity, Patrick sent in a "legitimate"
score of 1,610 and included information on how to spot
the score of anyone trying to take advantage of this
venerable game's infirmity. It is a far, far better thing you
do, Pat.
Norman Fong: answer your mail. The natives grow
restless.
Disputed:
Caverns of Mars: A.J. Benway challenging S. Rolin over
26,000 maximum possible score.
Falcons: J. Grisaffi challenging J. David over final digit;
fixed version.
SI
Match Racers, Gebelli
Megalegs, Megasoft
Meteoroids (Asteroids) in Space, Quailty
Microwave, Cavalier
Minotaur, Sirius
Missile Command, Atari
Missile Defense, Sierra On-line
Mission Escape, CE Software
Modoc's Tower, E pyx
Mouskattack (Apple), Sierra On-line
Mouskattack (Atari), Sierra On-Line
Nautilus, Synapse
Neptune, Gebelli
Nightmare Gallery, Synergistic
Night Mission Pinball, SubLogic
Norad, Southwestern Data
Odyssey, Synergistic
Orbitron, Sirius
Outpost, Sirius
Pacific Coast Highway (Atari), Datasoft
Pac -Man, Atari
Pathfinder, Gebelli
Peeping Tom, Micro Lab
Pegasus II, Sierra On-Line
Phantoms Five, Sirius
Photar, Softape
Pigpen, DataMost
Planetoids, Adventure Int'l
Preppie, Adventure Int'l
Procyon Warrior, Synergistic
Protector, Synapse
Pulsar II, Sirius
Quadrant 6112, Sensible
Raiders of the Lost Ring, Cavalier
Raster Blaster (Apple), BudgeCo
Raster Blaster (Atari), BudgeCo
Rear Guard (Apple), Adventure Int'l
Rear Guard (Atari), Adventure Int'l
Red Alert, Broderbund
R ibbrt, Piccadilly
Roach Hotel, Micro Lab
Rocket Command, Norell
Russki Duck, Gebelli
Sabotage, Sierra On-Line
Serpentine, Broderbund
Sheila, H. A. L. Labs
Shooting Gallery (Apple), Western Micro
Shooting Gallery (Atari), Western Micro
Snack Attack, DataMost
Snake Byte (Apple), Sirius
Snake Byte (Atari), Sirius
Sneakers, Sirius
Space Adventure, Sierra
Space Album: Asterisk, California Pacific
Space Album: Death Star, California Pacific
Space Album: Tail Gunner,
California Pacific
Space Eggs, Sirius
Space Invaders, Atari
Space Quarks, Broderbund
Space Warrior, Broderbund
Star Blaster, Piccadilly
Star Dance, USA
Star Raiders, Atari
Star Thief, Cavalier
Star Thief, Cavalier
Star Warrior, E pyx
Stellar Invaders, Apple
Suicide, Piccadilly
Super Breakout, Atari
Super Invader, several publishers
Super Stellar Trek, Rainbow
Swashbuckler, DataMost
Taipan, Avalanche
Tanktics, Avalon Hill
Taxman, H.A.L. Labs
Tharolian Tunnels, Software Farm
Thief, DataMost
Threshold (Apple), Sierra On-Line
Threshold (Atari), Sierra On-Line
Thunderbird, Urban Software
Torax, Creative Computing
Track Attack (Apple), Broderbund
Track Attack (Atari), Broderbund
Tranquility Base, California Pacific
Tsunami, Creative Computing
Tumblebugs (Apple), Datasoft
Tumblebugs (Atari), Datasoft
Twerps, Sirius
Viper, RDA Systems
Wormwall, Sirius
Zero Gravity Pinball, Avant-Garde
6,231.1 Miles
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
*61,340
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
55,335
Robert Pettit, Pittsburgh, PA
*109,061
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
*398,285
Christian Juhring, Carmel, CA
6,811,460
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
278,900
Marc Vlasak, Tacoma, WA
•3,161
Steve Allen, Des Moines, IA
14,317
Michael Hartwig, Lamoni, IA
•89,100
Mark Zeitler, Boca Raton, FL
590,300
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
43,100
Joey Grisaffi, Houston, TX
•13,040
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
141,050
Buell Hollister III, Shelburne, VT
•34,186,820
Mark Hessman, Andover, MA
•28,240
Jeff Baker, Alexandria, VA
•225,300
Judson Cohen, Los Angeles, CA
•153,000
Dennis McEntire, San Jose, CA
•30,855
Yung-Chi Chu, Flint, Ml
•100,900
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
934,793
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
•25,254,326
Brian Hall, Milford, Ml
•12,360
Jason Meggs, Bethesda, MD
•217,270
Fred Nisewanger, Fremont, CA
42,670
Steve Rothenberg, Mayfield Hts., OH
•324,299
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
•344,640
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
584,160
Jason Meggs, Rochester, NY
•59,310
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
•195,000
Keith Goldberg, Bellevue, WA
•58,000
Jon Mellott, Fort Wayne, IN
•61,968
Eric Vesjier, Saint Louis, MO
•71,990
Chuck Hartley, Natick, MA
•128,030
Francis Wong, Ellicott City, MD
7,025,500
Eric Morson, Stamford, CT
1,028,000
Robert Hahn, Dayton, OH
65,325
Matt Yuen, Van Nuys, CA
77,530
Joey Grisaffi, Houston, TX
•82,800
Michael Yang, Parma, OH
•231,980
Andrew Mellin, Fort Lauderdale, FL
•12,350
Mike Post, Huntington Beach, CA
•778,070
Paul MacQuiddy, Sunnyvale, CA
241,000
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
86,431
Steve Cloutier, East Greenwich, Rl
•705,650
Eric Snider, Franklin, Ml
91,500
Manuel Veloso, Lido Beach, NY
•3,495
Steve Rothenberg, Mayfield Hts., OH
•115,210
Shane Rolin, Monroeville, PA
•18,324
James Baker, Alexandria, VA
2,698,800
Lisa Kislan, North Palm Beach, FL
21,330
Chris Conway, Winnetka, CA
•1,035,982
Marc Brodsky, Woodbridge, CT
70
Brian Welch, Saint Louis, MO
•6,242
Jason Meggs, Bethesda, MD
•1,391
Dave Ness, Saratoga, CA
•44,898
Charles Campbell, San Jose, CA
53,000
Fred Nisewanger, Fremont, CA
55,625
Darryl Terry, Trinity, AL
•8,590
Pam Nitto, Binghamton, NY
44,441
William Tung, Towson, MO
•52,553
Samuel Wilkof, Canton, OH
•3,453
Gary Miller, Monroeville, PA
•Lt. Class 1
Ron Felder, Sunnyvale, CA
•23,660 (2 player)
Rob Berkowitz, Kenny Weinstock,
Goldens Bridge, NY
19,400 (1 player)
Max Harrell, Chickasaw, AL
•1,872
Ron Felder, Sunnyvale, CA
•119,000
Patrick Carle, Dunstable, MA
•58,250
Pam Nitto, Binghamton, NY
2,870
Randy Dellinger, Fort Belvoir, VA
99,675
Steve Rothenberg, Mayfield Hts., OH
7,262
Paul Creager, Sunnyvale, CA
•1,501
Brian Welch, Saint Louis, MO
$25.1 Billion
Roe R. Adams III, Hartford, CT
•495
David Melendez, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
•999,980
Eggy Paul, Orange, CA
48,183
Howard McGee, Denver, CO
•23,760
Scott Wedel, Saratoga, CA
*941,900
Norman Fong, San Francisco, CA
•309,500
Ron Felder, Sunnyvale, CA
•28,260
Erik Talvola, Santa Rosa, CA
•34,780
D. Archibald, Minneapolis, MN
•50,419
Buell Hollister IV, Shelburne, VT
•10,706
Chris Conway, Winnetka, CA
•1,700
Matt Rosenbaum, Montville, NJ
12,336
Kerry Shetline, Morristown, NJ
•7,205
Sharron Keck, Huntington Beach, CA
*7,023
David Rogers, Chagrin Falls, OH
•6,250
Dick Nitto, Binghamton, NY
•758
Andy Moore, Gaithersburg, FL
•120,380
Eric Vesper, Saint Louis, MO
17,050
Joey Grisaffi, Houston, TX
36
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